Climate change challenges disaster insurance affordability, as insurers raise premiums to constitute reserves and remain solvent in the face of correlated, fat-tailed losses. This paper measures the welfare effects of public reinsurance, which combines mandatory coverage with a government backstop to lower premiums in floodplains. Using geolocated administrative data at the dwelling level from France, Belgium, and Switzerland, I estimate the efficiency cost of public reinsurance arising from additional construction in floodplains. Comparing areas inside and outside floodplains over time, I find that public reinsurance in France increases flood damage costs by 4% over 1982-2100. I then use these reduced-form estimates to calibrate a spatial equilibrium model with an embedded insurance market. Comparing the damage costs of additional construction against the premium reductions and changes in insurers’ profits, I find that public reinsurance yields substantially larger welfare gains than a subsidized insurance scheme similar to the US National Flood Insurance Program. In the central scenario, these gains are above the total amount of flood damage costs. Importantly, these welfare estimates are likely to constitute a lower bound.

This paper demonstrates that unpaid rent risk deters landlords from supplying housing services to fragile renters; and that insuring owners against it improves the upward geographic mobility of constrained tenants to expensive, high-wage neighborhoods. We show theoretically that subsidizing rental insurance can improve efficiency by reducing the spatial misallocation of tenants. We test this prediction by studying the implementation of Visale, a publicly funded nationwide rent guarantee insurance policy in France, free of charge to eligible tenants and landlords. We exploit exhaustive registry information on all French households, data on the universe of Visale beneficiaries and claim payouts, and quasi-experimental eligibility variation across renters. We demonstrate that the non-payment guarantee increased access to private-sector rental housing for eligible tenants. The effects are stronger for immigrants, newly formed households, and those with low incomes, who often do not satisfy landlords’ standard screening criteria. By providing ex ante insurance, the scheme eased the long-distance spatial mobility of low-income renters towards higher-wage, higher-rent neighborhoods, at a moderate fiscal cost per marginal move.

Most studies measuring inequalities in exposure to climate disasters rely on aggregate income data and focus on residents. However, by omitting dwellings owned by nonresidents, this approach overlooks half of the housing stock exposed to flooding. Using dwelling-level data covering the entire French housing market, this paper examines how natural disaster risks are distributed across tenants, owner-occupants, and owners of rental, second, and vacant properties. The results highlight large differences with the standard approach that focuses on residents. Once properties owned by nonresidents are included, flood risk disproportionately affects second homes, while subsidence mainly affects owner-occupied dwellings. These patterns have important policy implications. First, untargeted flood insurance subsidies tend to benefit second homes, whereas subsidence coverage mainly supports owner-occupied dwellings. Second, using a new approach to estimate risk discounts, this study shows that natural disaster risks are not priced into rental, second, and vacant properties, driving at least 15% of the total overvaluation in flood-prone areas.

This article examines the difficulties anticipated by companies in France when it comes to recruiting staff. We match data from the 2018 and 2019 Besoins en Main‑d’Œuvre surveys on workforce needs with company data from the FARE annual structural statistics of companies from the ESANE scheme and the DADS (Déclaration annuelle de données sociales – Annual Declaration of Social Data) to examine how recruitment difficulties are distributed by sector, location and size of the establishment and employment area characteristics. Together, these factors explain around 6% of the total variation in recruitment challenges, increasing to 14% when incorporating recruitment difficulties reported in the previous year. Most of the recruitment difficulties anticipated thus result from factors not observed in the data used in this article, potentially linked to the internal characteristics of each establishment, such as the quality of management and specific recruitment processes.

An important psychological phenomenon (or bias) is the Better-than-average effect, whereby people consider themselves to be superior to others in many dimensions that are positive and less likely to engage in negative behaviors. We study the role of this bias in the context of redistribution and paternalistic policies. First, we document that people perceive themselves to be superior to others not only in the standard dimensions explored so far but also along many dimensions that are directly relevant to redistribution policy, such as how they spend their money or government transfers, how they react to policy changes, or the extent to which they free-ride on government policies. Second, we highlight that this bias is especially strong when people compare themselves to lower-income others. The prevalence of this bias differs by education, income, political leaning, and gender. Third, we show that those who have stronger biases support less redistribution and more paternalistic ways of redistributing. This link appears for in a correlational sense and also causally, through our experiment. Our experiment is a de-biasing intervention that helps people understand that they might be prone to such a bias. It comes in three forms, each creating the link to redistribution and paternalistic policies more and more explicitly.

Landlords and tenants, on average, have opposite characteristics; but they display positive assortative matching within rental markets. In a nationwide data set containing administrative information on linked renter-occupiers and owners of investment properties for 4.5 million private rental dwellings in France, we document assortative matching by income level and composition, wealth, age, marital status and family structure, both across and within fine geographic segments. Consistent with a novel theory of rental housing assignment, the income correlation is only partially explained by observable characteristics such as location, size, or investment timing. It is mediated through high-wealth landlords listing higher-rent units occupied by high-income tenants, partly thanks to the filtering of the housing stock from past owner-occupiers to current renters. This pattern has quantitatively substantial implications for the measurement of returns to wealth, and the incidence of housing market policies, such as means-tested subsidies.

Construction in disaster-prone areas is rising, which has led to mounting pressure to reform disaster insurance, notably by raising premiums. Combining building-level data from Belgium with a spatial equilibrium model, I discuss how construction taxes can be a more efficient way to regulate development in risky areas than insurance-based policies. First, construction taxes fall only on households moving into floodplains, whereas insurance-based policies typically charge all residents, including those who never move. Second, because low-income households underestimate flood risk to a large extent, insurance-based policies increase the share of uninsured low-income households living in floodplains. Third, insurance-based policies can lead insurers to leave the market, whereas construction taxes can be paired with measures that prevent the market from unravelling.

Face à l’envolée du coût de ces catastrophes, il devient crucial d’identifier les populations les plus exposées. Dans cette note, Thomas Bézy et Lucas Chancel détaillent comment mettre en place une couverture assurantielle complète contre les risques climatiques et proposent des plans de financement évitant de mettre à contribution les ménages les plus modestes.

In many parts of the world the costs of flooding are projected to rise sharply due to climate change and urbanization in flood-prone areas. This study compares the rate of construction in high-risk zones across France and the UK, and discusses the impact of insurance and urban planning policies. In both France and the U.K., the housing stock in flood-prone areas keeps growing substantially every year, and new construction in flood risk areas has not shown any sizeable sign of slowing down in recent years. In France, second homes are overrepresented in flood-risk zones, contrasting with the U.K. Both countries show higher rates in low-income neighbourhoods, raising concerns about the emergence of socially deprived areas at high risk of flooding that may not have access to insurance, sometimes called “flood ghettos”. While insurance is subsidized in both countries, a key distinction is that new build homes at risk do not benefit from subsidized rates in the U.K., whereas they do in France. However, this difference does not appear to substantially deter construction in risky areas in the U.K. compared to France. These findings highlight challenges in balancing risk reduction, affordability, and sustainable development.