The Association Française de Science Économique (AFSE) announced the 2023 laureate of its Prix Edmond Malinvaud: Michele FIORETTI.

The AFSE (French Economic Association) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1950. It aims at promoting exchange of knowledge and participation of its members in public debates on economic policies. It is open to all economists, whether they work in universities, public research organizations, government bodies or private companies.

Every year the AFSE awards a Prize for the best paper published in an indexed EconLit, peer-reviewed journal in the past two years by a young economist affiliated to a French laboratory.

The Department's permanent faculty member Michele Fioretti is awarded the 2023 Prix Edmond Malivaud for his paper entitled Caring or pretending to care? Social impact, firms’ objectives, and welfare, published in November 2022 in the Journal of Political Economy.

The jury wanted to shed light on the topic of firms’ social responsibility for which only a limited amount of literature aiming at quantifying possible impacts is available. This paper has the merit of opening the black box of social impact to understand the welfare implications for concerned agents. In particular, results obtained by Michele highlight that consumers might have a limited role in explaining corporate prosocial expenses. Therefore, social impact implies a trade-off between the payoffs to the firm and its suppliers rather than between the payoffs to the firm and its consumers, suggesting new avenues of research, as most of the social responsibility literature focuses on consumer choices.

The jury especially appreciated the combination of techniques carried out by Michele: micro data analysis with large data sets, econometric methods, development of a new structural model to disentangle drivers of supply and demand. Throughout this single-author paper, Michele shows that he masters the toolkit of modern economists and uses it efficiently to shed light on a major topic.

Michele’s research interests include empirical industrial organisation, behavioural economics, and applied microeconomics. His work focuses on understanding firms' strategies with applications on social impact firms and sectors with a social dimension such as the health and the energy sectors. He is currently working on a 2-year project related to governance problems in decentralized networks with the support of McCourt Institute.

Michele joined the Department in 2019 as Assistant Professor of Economics.

The 2023 Edmond Malinvaud Prize will be awarded to Michele at the AFSE’s Annual Congress that the Department has the honour of hosting next week, June 14-16.

Congratulations to Michele Fioretti !

More about Michele FIORETTI and his research

Read about the Edmond Malinvaud Prize on AFSE's website (in French)