Collaborateurs, emplois familiaux et niveau d'activité des parlementaires français

This article takes advantage of the recent release, following the "Fillon scandal", of a list of all assistants employed by the 920 current parliamentarians in France, to quantify family employment by deputies and senators. By linking this information with demographic and political characteristics, we give a portray of parliamentarians who employ family members. Finally, after merging these statistics to publicly-available data on officials' observable activity in the Parliament during the last 12 months, we show that parliamentarians who employ family members as assistants are significantly less present, less active and less productive in the Assembly and in the Senate compared to others, all else equal. This result either suggests that employing a family member (instead of other assistants) reduces activity in the Parliament (causal effect), or that those who use family jobs are also relatively low-activity parliamentarians (selection effect). Instrumental variable regressions tend to favor the second hypothesis.