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 

More about Ghazala AZMAT and her research