Économie politique du changement institutionnel (EPCI)

This paper assesses the impact of air pollution on human capital using comprehensive data on the results in the two main national exams in France, the “Brevet” (9th grade) and the “Baccalauréat” (12th grade), for the cohorts 2010 to 2017. By leveraging daily random variations in air pollution between exam days, we show that fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration above the WHO threshold significantly decreases the test score only for the poorest and foreign students. This result is robust using the instrumental variables method, exploiting day-to-day variations in wind direction. Taking a Brevet exam on a day when PM2.5 levels exceed WHO recommendations results in a 5% standard deviation decrease in test score for the poorest students. These students also have the greatest academic difficulties, further exacerbating educational inequalities.

L’article présente un travail en cours sur les baromètres de la DREES et du CREDOC sur longue période (plusieurs décennies) portant sur les critiques de l’État social et de ses bénéficiaires. Pour cela, il présente les données et questions mobilisées, observe les tendances de long terme, analyse leurs déterminants sociaux et leur évolution sur la période. Enfin, il étend cette étude vers les liens entre cette critique et le vote.

L’accès au pouvoir politique, condition de la mise en œuvre de politiques économiques et de réformes structurelles, suppose la constitution de coalitions et de blocs sociaux qui chacun aspire à occuper une position dominante. Comment se forment ces blocs ? Comment l’un d’entre eux parvient-il à être dominant et à prendre le pouvoir mais aussi à le conserver, en dépit des crises économiques, institutionnelles ou idéologiques auxquelles il est confronté ? Bruno Amable et Stefano Palombarini présentent un cadre d’analyse permettant de répondre à ces questions et de comprendre ainsi la grande variété historique des conflits politiques.

This article presents a neglected change in housing policy in the last half-century in Europe and theorizes its potential on welfare: the rise of tenure inequalities. From a post-war politics of mass housing provision, West-European welfare States switched to a post-Fordist promotion of massive homeownership accession through mortgage credit. This change, hereunder called housing financialization, while initially associated with rising homeownership rates, has come to be associated with fast-rising housing prices, progressively excluding higher shares of households from accessing homeownership. This article finds that these processes are associated with higher housing costs for renters, more unequal housing costs amongst income groups and increasing inequalities in homeownership accession between income groups. Lower- and middle-income groups appear increasingly excluded from homeownership accession while simultaneously more disadvantaged on the rental market. This is termed ‘tenure inequalities’ and might underlie other phenomena observed in the literature such as refamiliarization and rising territorial inequalities

This article investigates the sub-national political geography of Populist Radical Right (PRR) voting in Italy and France. We argue for a move beyond overarching narratives that seek to uniformly explain populist performance across entire national territories, as if each party’s electorate shared homogeneous characteristics. Drawing on Harteveld et al. (2022), we emphasize the concept of ‘multiple roots’—diverse, context-specific predictors that shape PRR support in distinct regions within the same country. We thus rely on geographical variation in voting patterns to identify sub-national heterogeneity within the social bloc (Amable and Palombarini, 2024) supporting right-wing populism. This analytical framework is applied to the 2022 Italian Parliamentary election and the 2024 French Legislative election, with a focus on the performance of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy – FdI), Matteo Salvini’s Lega (League), and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally). Preliminary findings for Italy indicate divergent geographical bases for FdI between Northern and Southern regions. In the affluent North, FdI’s electorate aligns more closely with the ‘losers of modernization’ thesis, with right-wing populist support clustering in lower-income areas. Conversely, in the South, FdI more closely resembles the sociological profile of a traditional conservative party, where in particular support for FdI correlates positively with average income. Nonetheless, a common pattern emerges across both North and South, as education consistently shows a negative correlation with support for PRR parties.

Although remaining controversial and still in its infancy, the greening of monetary policy and financial regulation is spreading. Such a green turn may mean more than merely a set of technical adjustments to central banks operations and risk management by financial institutions. If history offers a guide, significant changes in the forms taken by money, modalities of its issuance, of its circulation and in the basis of its valuation may herald equally substantial mutations in the broader political economy. These shifts can also affect the institutional and productive structures of societies. Our paper takes stock of this environmental turn among monetary and financial authorities throughout the world, keeping in mind that such changes do not occur in an institutional vacuum and instead co-evolve with the other institutional forms governing the society. We assemble a comprehensive database of policies integrating environmental criteria into monetary policy and financial regulation to date. We characterize the main varieties of green monetary regimes. Further, we analyze whether the choice of specific green monetary arrangements can be explained by the institutional configuration surrounding a country’s environmental state as well as other factors. We conclude, based on these results, by discussing the consequences of the greening of the monetary regime for social-ecological transformation in different institutional contexts as well as for the overall consistency and stability of capital accumulation regimes.

Alors que notre époque est marquée par l’urgence climatique, la transition écologique peine à s’enclencher. Il existe bien d’autres urgences économiques et sociales plus immédiates, bien d’autres aspirations et préoccupations. Comment concilier nos buts ? Régler ce qui nous divise ? Comment consolider notre unité dans l’action ? À travers une analyse profonde et percutante, l’ouvrage examine les échecs du passé et identifie une même mécanique : l’approche technocratique traditionnellement suivie mène à l’impasse, comme dans le cas emblématique de la taxe carbone. La focalisation excessive sur les mesures techniques empêche de prendre à bras le corps le véritable défi : la nécessité de revoir et de redéfinir le contrat social. La transition écologique nécessite une approche politique et démocratique pour gérer les conflits, les désaccords et les aspirations divergentes au sein de la société. L’ouvrage plaide pour concerter la transition écologique et engager l’ensemble de la société dans la construction d’un avenir commun. Semblable à un processus constituant, ce changement d’approche vise à construire un nouveau contrat écologique, un compromis de société qui décloisonne les questions sociales, économiques et écologiques.

This paper examines the relationship between the financialization of households, racial discrimination in wage negotiations, and the racial pay gap in the United States between 1989 and 2024, using quarterly data from the SCF and the CPS. Regression analysis shows that, independently, the rising household debt burden faced by Black and African American households and the highest share of white business owners have been key negative drivers of the Black-White pay gap. This finding complements existing work which shows that personal debt makes indebted workers less demanding in wage negotiations to avoid losing their job and defaulting on their debt. However, interacting the two coefficients shows that the larger the share of white business owners in the economy, the weaker the negative effect of debt held by Black workers on the black-white wage gap is. We argue that despite white businesses discriminating against black workers in wage negotiations, a white business might be a safer option for an indebted black worker in terms of financing their debt liabilities since it is less likely to fail and, thus, offers better job stability. The measures of household debt burden used include total household debt, mortgage, and consumer credit liabilities as a share of the assets held by the respective racial groups, and our econometric findings are robust for all different measures of personal debt held by Black and African American households. Further experimentation with the Chicago Fed National Financial Conditions Index provides some evidence that adverse financial market conditions exacerbate the disciplinary effects of debt for Black workers. At the same time, debt held by White workers does not seem to have any notable effects on the racial pay gap. Overall, our results contrast mainstream financial literacy/education theories which argue that giving access to finance to underrepresented social groups can lead to more egalitarian outcomes. Instead, we show that the fear of defaulting on their debt makes Black and African American workers rather more vulnerable in the labour market.