Séminaire de Sébastien MÉNARD

Séminaire de Sébastien MÉNARD

Le 2 décembre 2025

Le prochain séminaire du GAINS se tiendra le 02 décembre 2025 de 10h30 à 12h00 dans la salle T204. Sébastien Ménard (Le Mans Université) présentera « Job search monitoring and standard of proof: Why do the employment advisor's preferences matter? » coécrit avec Solenne Tanguy (Le Mans Université).

Abstract: This article investigates how employment advisors’ preferences shape the effectiveness of unemployment‐monitoring policies. We develop a three-agent framework involving a legislator, an employment advisor, and an unemployed worker, in which information frictions are central: neither the worker’s search effort nor the advisor’s enforcement behavior is perfectly observable. The employment advisor is assumed to be averse to judgment errors—his utility declines when he imposes a sanction that is, ex post, unwarranted. We show that when the legislator increases the statutory severity of sanctions, the advisor responds by raising the standard of proof required to justify penalizing an unemployed worker, thereby reducing the probability of mistakenly sanctioning a compliant individual. As a consequence, tighter statutory sanctions generate ambiguous effects on workers’ search incentives and may, under certain conditions, undermine the effectiveness of monitoring. To address this inefficiency, we propose two corrective mechanisms: (i) the introduction of a warning system that lowers the risk of wrongful sanctions, and (ii) granting the employment advisor discretion to adjust the severity of the sanction in proportion to the search evidence actually observed.

Pour ceux qui ne peuvent pas venir en présentiel, voici un lien zoom:

https://univ-lemans-fr.zoom.us/j/97691589728?pwd=ZCjjMOWNaQaCsxzorTEZG30bD9bHdU.1

Meeting ID: 976 9158 9728
Passcode: 975063