MRes/PhD in Economics

I have cultivated throughout my studies and professional experiences a keen interest in public and labour economics. I was inspired by the work of leading researchers, such as Antoine Bozio, Camille Landais and Emmanuel Saez, but also stricken by the paucity of conclusive evidence in the field of public economics, while social spending represents a significant share of government budget, is a major line of political cleavage and a powerful instrument to alleviate growing inequalities likely to be exacerbated by the current pandemic crisis and economic downturn.

The further development of public economic research is timely for two reasons. First, a positive approach to good government and welfare has the potential to rationalise the political discourse and to mitigate populist tendencies. Second methodological advances since the Credibility Revolution coined by Joshua Angrist and Steve Pischke, and the increasing access to quality data render empirical economics better armed than ever to answer the questions it is facing and convincingly convey its insights.

During my PhD, I intend to focus on three topics: corporate taxation, labour income inequality and gender inequality.

Corporate taxation and labour income inequality
While the rise of inequalities as an empirical fact is well-established, its drivers are less well understood. Two lines of argument emerge from that debate. The first one claims that concentration of income and wealth is linked to the structure of company ownership and corporate finance. In that view, the flourishing of multinational firms, and tax evasion and avoidance are key, potentially primary drivers of income concentration. Without doubt, the environment in which corporations evolve has a substantial influence on inequality, and advances to be made in that strand of literature are both theoretical and empirical.
The second line of argument attributes rampant inequalities to the evolving structure of the labour income distribution, with rising between-firm disparities in earnings.
I plan to examine those two topics from an empirical angle, using where possible administrative datasets, such as the French FARE and FICUS databases on firms financials and employment.

Gender inequality
During my pre-doctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Professor Camille Landais, one of my project focused on gender inequality, and in particular on the gap in earnings, and labour force participation that emerges at the time of first child birth between men and women. I would like to reflect on the drivers and ways to alleviate that phenomenon, and to investigate in particular the role of social norms and family policies.