I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Strasbourg. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from LEM-CNRS University of Lille and from Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.
My research interests are international macroeconomics and inequality, with an emphasis on financial cycles. I explore the circular relationship between income inequality, household credit and financial crises. I also investigate the consequences and the policy implications of these cycles.
My Curriculum Vitae is here in english and in french.
Publications
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Trilemma, Dilemma and Global Players, Journal of International Money and Finance, 2018, 85(6), 20-39. Supplementary Material
- La relation circulaire entre inégalités de revenu et finance: tour d’horizon de la littérature et résultats récents, Revue d’Economie Financière, 2018, 128(1), 127-152 (with Rémi Bazillier and Jérôme Héricourt).
Working Papers
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Structure of Income Inequality and Household Leverage: Cross-Country Causal Evidence (with Rémi Bazillier and Jérôme Héricourt)
Last Version (July 2020) Online Appendix
CES Working Paper (2019), CEPII Working Paper (2017-01), Lettre du CEPII N°379. In the media: Le Monde, The Conversation
Abstract: How does income inequality and its structure affect credit? Based on various strands of the literature, we support that rising income inequality should bring higher household credit at the aggregate level, and that a substantial part of the positive impact of inequality on credit should be driven by the impoverishment of middle classes relatively to top incomes. These intuitions are empirically confirmed by a study based on a country-level dataset over the period 1970-2017. We identify exogenous variations of inequality through the total number of ratified ILO conventions and factor endowments at the country-level. Our results show that exogenous variations in inequality have a positive impact on household credit: a one standard-deviation increase in the Gini index generates a 5.5 to 8 percentage points expansion in the ratio of household credit over GDP. In addition, the impact is 1.4 to 2.6 times stronger when top incomes increase relatively to middle incomes, rather than at the expense of bottom incomes. Those results are robust to various instruments, databases, controls, and variable definitions. They also consistently disappear in countries where financial markets are insufficiently developed.
2. Fire Sales and Debt Maturity (Available upon request)
Abstract: How does debt maturity structure affect fire sales? I show how debt maturity can trigger financial crises by introducing debt maturity in a Fisherian deflation model. In particular, using a stock/flow analysis, I find (i) that an excessive reliance on short-term debt exacerbates the risk of financial crises due to fire sales and (ii) that this risk is driven by a rise in the term premium. I confirm these two testable predictions with an empirical study of data from 69 emerging and developing countries from 1970 to 2017. This shows that debt maturity structure is a good early warning indicator of financial crises, which adds information compared with the level of external debt alone.
3. Le silence des communes: le fond de sortie des emprunts toxiques (with Maxime Fajeau and Alexandre Mayol)
Work in Progress
- The Anatomy of Financial Cycles (with Clément Mathonnat)
- The Consequences of the Dexia Crisis (with Maxime Fajeau and Alexandre Mayol)
- Do Credit Distribution and Demography Matter for Regional Inequality? (with Florian Bonnet)
- A Social Mobility Dividend (with Laila Ait Bihi Ouali and Mehdi El Herradi)
- Phillips Curves in European Countries (with Francesco de Palma, Jamel Saadaoui and Yann Thommen)
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Common Agricultural Policy and Climate Shocks (with Rémi Généroso and Clément Nédoncelle)
Contact: ligonniere@unistra.fr
