Francis Kramarz

Researcher at Collège de France and Emeritus Professor at Uppsala University

Area of Expertise

Labor
Trade

Biography

Francis is currently a researcher at the Farhi Innovation Lab, Collège de France, and Emeritus Professor at Uppsala University.

His main contributions are in empirical labor economics and international trade, where he helped establish the use of matched employer-employee data to study wages, firms, worker mobility, and the labor-market effects of trade. His current research examines how social and firm networks affect firms’ outcomes, especially their resilience to shocks.

He was Visiting Professor at Bocconi University in 2024–25 and a researcher at Le Mans University in 2023–24. He previously served as Emeritus Professor and Research Director at ENSAE, and as Director of CREST until the end of 2019.

He has also held several academic and public service positions, including at École Polytechnique, Yale, the French low-pay commission, the French Council of Economic Analysis, the Conseil d’orientation pour l’emploi, and the Attali Commission.

Last publications

- Labor market
Exploiting Growth Opportunities:The Role of Internal Labour

We explore how business groups use internal labour markets (ILMs) in response to changing eco- nomic conditions. We show that following the exit of a large industry competitor, group-affiliated firms expand, and gain market share by increasing their reliance on the ILM to ensure swift hiring, especially of technical managers and skilled blue collar workers. […]
Written by
- Francis Kramarz
- Giacinta Cestone
- Chiara Fumagalli
- Giovanni Pica
Download PDF
How do firms value sales career paths?

Sales employees can build their careers across industries, firms, and occupations. Yet it is unclear how their sales career paths affect their compensation. To assess the value of their experience, we examine the paychecks drawn by nearly 25,000 sales employees over 22 years. Consistent with our arguments, we find that firms place greater value on […]
Written by
- Francis Kramarz
- Ali Reza Keshavarz
- Dominique Rouzies
- Bertrand Quelin
- Michael Segalla
Download PDF
High wage workers and high wage firms

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers from more than five hundred thousand employing firms. We decompose real total annual compensation per worker into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At […]
Written by
- Francis Kramarz
- John M. Abowd
- David N. Margolis
Download PDF
An anatomy of international trade: evidence from french firms

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers from more than five hundred thousand employing firms. We decompose real total annual compensation per worker into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At […]
Written by
- Francis Kramarz
- Jonathan Eaton
- Samuel Khortum
Download PDF
Weak Optimal Transport With Unnormalized Kernels

We introduce a new variant of the weak optimal transport problem where mass is distributed from one space to the other through unnormalized kernels. We give sufficient conditions for primal attainment and prove a dual formula for this transport problem. We also obtain dual attainment conditions for some specific cost functions. As a byproduct, we […]
Written by
- Francis Kramarz
- Philippe Choné
- Nathael Gozlan
See publication