In late April, the European Research Council (ERC) officially published the list of projects it retained for its 2020 “Advanced Grants” Call. Only 8% of submitted proposals were successful for this year’s round.

As a reminder, ERC Advanced Grants are awarded to established researchers who have a track-record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years and who would like long-term funding to pursue a ground-breaking, high risk project.

The project submitted by permanent faculty member Jean-Marc ROBIN, is one of the six projects selected in the field of economics at the European level (and only one of two French projects). It is the 6th time in a little over a year that that one of the Department’s faculty members has been awarded ERC funding.

Jean-Marc ROBIN’s research interests focus on microeconometrics, labour microeconomics and search and matching. In 2011 he was already awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his project "Wage Dynamics, Sorting Patterns in Labour Markets and Policy Evaluation" (WASP), completed in 2016. The "Bipartite Network Models for Marriage and Labour Markets" (MARNET) project is naturally in alignment with his previous research but, as Jean-Marc ROBIN points out himself: “Although all my past work already refers in one way or another to this topic (i.e. networked systems in econometrics), my current approach to the problem in this research proposal is different from the methodology that I have most often used in the past. I will focus on two main empirical economic applications: 1) marriage formation and intra-household resources allocation, 2) wage dynamics and job mobility.”

The project “aims at improving our empirical knowledge of markets structured as bipartite networks (all connections involve two different categories of agents) by providing better statistical models of network formation and of the effects of the network structure on outcomes.”

His research will exploit intensive developments in graph theory in recent years - notably random graphs, “…the second most important application of graph theory in economics” - computer science and machine learning in order to map networked systems. “To be interesting and useful, models of economic networks must not only describe links between nodes, but also how the network structure relates to outcome variables of interest. For example, the fact that individuals 1 and 2 are connected may imply a statistical link between the outcome Y_1 for 1 and the outcome Y_2 for 2.” The use of dynamic random graphs will allow him to study the “interaction between social norms and marriage (monogamous and heterosexual)…”, “… to better understand why different marriage markets (regions, countries, time periods) look different” and to “improve models for linked employer-employee data (LEED)” by “studying wage dynamics and employment mobility”.

Jean-Marc ROBIN joined the Department in 2010 and served as Chair from 2013 to 2018. He is also Professor of Economics (part-time) at University College London and a team member of the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CEMMAP) at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Jean-Marc Robin is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and an elected member of its Council as well as of the Council of the European Economic Association.

In 2018 he became a Founding Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics. As of 2019, Jean-Marc ROBIN is a Senior Member of the prestigious Institut universitaire de France (IUF).

Read more about the MARNET Project
Consult the ERC’s press release

More about Jean-Marc ROBIN and his research