Roy-ADRES Seminar *in-person* - Mar 21st
Portrait of René Roy and stylised equations
Annie LIANG is Assistant Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. She is also the Karr Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Prior to joining Northwestern, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research-New England.
Her research is in economic theory—in particular, learning and information—and the application of machine learning methods for model building and evaluation.
Annie LIANG will present a paper, joint with Jay LU, and Xiaosheng MU, at the next Roy-ADRES Seminar on the theme:
Algorithmic Design: Fairness Versus Accuracy (read abstract, PDF 16.59 KB)
More about Annie LIANG and her research
Date: MONDAY, March 21st - 5 PM
Location: PSE - Jourdan Campus - Room R2-21
The next Roy-ADRES Seminar will host Ben GOLUB (Northwestern University) on March 28th.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101001694)
Departmental Seminar *via Zoom* - Mar 21st
Stylised calendar data
Aislinn BOHREN is Associate Professor at the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group. Among her editorial duties she is Associate Editor at the American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Literature, and Theoretical Economics.
She studies various topics in microeconomics with a focus on models of information and how individuals interact in dynamic settings. Her research explores questions related to learning under model misspecification, discrimination, information aggregation, moral hazard and the econometrics of randomized experiments.
Aislinn BOHREN will present a paper, joint with Daniel N. HAUSER, at the next Departmental Seminar on the theme:
Representing Heuristics as Misspecified Models (read abstract, PDF 30.49 KB)
More about Aislinn BOHREN and her research
Date: MONDAY, March 21st - 2:45 PM
Location: Zoom
The next Departmental Seminar will host Sevgi YUKSEL (University of California at Santa Barbara) on March 28th.
Friday Seminar *in-person* - Mar 18th
Paper in a typewriter on which it is written "New Research"
Juan Sebastián IVARS is a PhD Candidate in Economics at Sciences Po working on a thesis entitled Competition, Dynamics, Motivated Beliefs and Team Incentives, under the supervision of Jeanne HAGENBACH.
Juan Sebastián IVARS will present a paper at the next Friday Seminar on the theme:
Teams and Asymmetric Awareness
Mylène FEUILLADE is a PhD Candidate in Economics at Sciences Po working on a thesis entitled Spatial Wage Disparities and Individual Location Choices, under the supervision of Pierre-Pierre COMBES. She was a pre-doctoral Research Associate for two years at INSEAD.
Her area of interest is urban economics, and in particular spatial wage inequalities, household location choices, local labour specialisation.
Mylène FEUILLADE will present a paper at the next Friday Seminar on the theme:
Household Location Choices and Labour Market Outcomes
Date: FRIDAY, March 18th - 12:30 PM
Location: Department of Economics - 4th floor - Room H 405
The next Friday Seminar will host Victor SAINT-JEAN (PhD Candidates, Sciences Po) on March 25th.
Ghazala AZMAT awarded ERC "Consolidator" grant for UNEQUALED project
Isolated young traveller sitting at the intersection of two roads
March 17th, the European Research Council (ERC) officially published the list of projects retained for its 2021 “Consolidator Grants” Call. Only 12% of submitted proposals were successful for this year’s round.
As a reminder, ERC Consolidator Grants are destined to help mi-career researchers consolidate their own teams and carry out innovative projects across all scientific disciplines.
The project “UNEQUAL EDucation: The Role of Educational Constraints in Shaping Inequalities” (UNEQUALED), submitted by Ghazala AZMAT, permanent faculty member, is one of nine projects selected in the field of economics at the European level.
It is the 4th ERC project that the Department has added to its “ongoing projects” in a year’s time! Jean-Marc ROBIN was awarded an “Advanced ERC” grant last year, and the arrival this Fall of Isabelle MEJEAN and Moritz SCHULARICK brought with them their ERC projects TRADENET and SAFEHOUSE.
Ghazala AZMAT is Professor of Economics at the Department since 2016. She is currently Joint Managing Editor of Economic Policy. She is also a Research Fellow at the CEPR (Labour Economics, Public Economics, Organizational Economics, and Political Economy), a Research Fellow of IZA, and Research Fellow of the CESifo Research Network. Prior to joining Sciences Po, she was a Professor at Queen Mary University of London and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She holds a PhD in Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
In 2020, Ghazala Azmat was selected to become a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) – a 5-year appointment that aims to support the emergence of new scientific leaders. Very recently, she was appointed as the Chair of the European Economic Association (EEA) Standing Committee on Women in Economics (WinE).
Her primary fields of research are Labour Economics, Economics of Education, Organizational Economics, and Gender Economics. She has published in several international journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of European Economic Association, Quantitative Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Public Economics.
Ghazala AZMAT’s project UNEQUALED follows her ANR project “Aspirations, Inequality and Outcomes” (ASPIRE), in which she sought to increase the understanding of the role played by one's aspirations to explain sociodemographic differences that persist in the labour market. The project combined a variety of theoretical and empirical contributions to answer the question.
With UNEQUALED, Ghazala AZMAT moves the cursor further back in time and reverses the question by seeking to understand and quantify the “educational constraints faced by individuals at a stage when they are planning their future investments in human capital”. Aspirations may indeed feed into educational choices, but other barriers may lead to unequal learning and opportunities.
In order to conduct this line of research, Ghazala AZMAT faces the challenge of building broad, representative data setsand overcoming the fact that “the environment in which individuals’ educational plans are formed, and adjust, is typically endogenous to their characteristics.” She therefore will “combine economic concepts with field interventions, experiments, and rich econometric and analytical tools to analyse big datasets and to causally estimate the impact of the components that drive the adjustment in educational plans”. Her work is designed to capture both the short and long-run impacts on educational outcomes that shape persistent inequalities.
Read more about the UNEQUALED Project
Consult the ERC’s press release
Week-end read: B. Marx
Silhouettes of heads discussing ideas
When the Department was created a little over 10 years ago, it simultaneously created its own collection of working papers – the Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series. Our goal is to make our latest research available to fellow economists, scholars and institutions all over the world as soon as possible.
The collection is available online on our website and will soon be completely available as well on the new the Sciences Po-HAL Institution Repository (former SPIRE) where it is linked to RePEC’s EconPapers.
As you will discover, the collection attests to the broadening of the Department’s topics, along with the recruitment of new, brilliant researchers, to include a theoretical economics research cluster, development economics and the extension of its expertise in macroeconomics, dealing notably with informational frictions – without neglecting its core fields in political economy, international economics, labour economics and econometrics.
Under the scientific direction of Department Head Thierry MAYER and permanent faculty member Benjamin MARX, our discussion papers have been flourishing – they are almost systematically taken up by international research networks and institutions in their working paper series (CEPR, IZA, NBER, …).
If you are looking for something to read over the holidays and weekends, we are spotlighting a few recent Sciences Po Economics Discussion Papers from our younger researchers that have been picking up traction.
Benjamin MARX joined the permanent faculty of the Department in 2018, just after defending his thesis at the Massuchessets Institute of Technology (MIT).
Specialised in political economy and development, his research focuses on the determinants of political accountability, state capacity, and voting behaviour in developing countries.
His recent paper Electoral Turnovers (Sciences Po Econ DP 2022-03, February 2022), co-authored with Vincent PONS (Harvard Business School) and Vincent ROLLET (PhD Candidate, MIT), has been disseminated by both the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR DP 17047) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER WP 29766).
The paper tackles a blindspot in the literature on the consequences of electoral turnovers on the national level, i.e. how they may affect country performance. Some important work has been done on the impact of term limits in local elections as well as on the impact on growth of power transitions in autocracies.
Intuitively, the impact of electoral turnovers on country performance could go either way: as Benjamin and co-authors write, they “could give new impetus to a country’s performance by bringing to power new leaders facing stronger reelection incentives and reputation concerns” but the “the loss of political experience, the personnel instability, and the policy uncertainty created by turnovers could be detrimental to economic performance”.
One of the main difficulties confronting researchers in evaluating the impact of electoral turnovers is the fact that they are often the result of an economic downturn, i.e. they are not random events. An uptick in country performance after elections may not be due so much to the newly-elected government’s characteristics as it may be due to the economic cycle. Another difficulty in analyzing the consequences of electoral turnovers is the wide range of outcomes to consider – not only may they have an impact on economic performance but also on “international trade, human development, peace, and the quality of democracy”.
To address these questions, Benjamin and co-authors built a novel dataset of national election results, worldwide since 1945. They focus on close elections in which the incumbent narrowly lost or won in order to be able to attribute economic performance to the election outcomes.
The ambition of their paper is timely: as Benjamin and co-authors write, “(a)ssessing the costs and benefits of turnovers is particularly relevant to current debates on the merits of democracy prompted by democratic backsliding in many countries”.
They find, overall, that “voting for change matters: electoral turnovers deliver improvements in country level performance along many dimensions” and “provides reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects of electoral democracy”.
For a complete discussion of their approach and their results, read the paper !
More about Benjamin MARX and his research
Discover the full Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series
