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CURRENT POSITION: I am an Assistant Professor ("Lecturer") in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne since October 2015.

EDUCATION: PhD in Economics from Paris School of Economics.

RESEARCH FIELDS: Environmental and resource economics, Public economics, Political economy.

FULL CV here.

PAST POSITION & EDUCATION,
2013-2015        Research Officer, London School of Economics (LSE), Grantham Research Institute & Ecole Centrale Paris
2009-2013        PhD in Economics, Paris School of Economics (PSE), Fossil fuels and climate policy. Supervisor: Prof. Roger Guesnerie.
2010-2011        Visiting PhD Student (European doctoral program), London School of Economics, GRI
2006-2009        M.S. in Economics, Paris School of Economics (PSE), APE (Analyse et Politique Economiques)
2007-2008        M.A. in International Relations, Sciences-Po Paris
2005-2009        Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (Social Sciences), Full Fellowship (Normalien)


RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 

  • The Grey Paradox: How fossil-fuels owners can benefit from carbon taxation (with Fanny Henriet), LSE (GRI-WP), 2014 (Revised & resumit at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management)
    ABSTRACT: This paper studies the distributional impacts of optimal carbon taxation on fossil-fuels owners. Contrary to OPEC claims, we find that optimal carbon taxation can increase the profits of owners of a carbon-emitting exhaustible resource, e.g. conventional oil or gas. We build a dynamic model where a polluting exhaustible resource competes with a dirtier abundant resource and a clean backstop. CO2 concentration has to be kept under a carbon ceiling. A time-dependent carbon tax is set to optimally use these resources under the carbon constraint. As the carbon ceiling is tightened, the exhaustible-resource profits are partly captured by the tax levier but the dirtier resource is made less competitive. We provide analytical expressions of these two effects, and determine conditions over reserves' size, pollution contents, extraction costs and demand elasticity such that the exhaustible-resource owners' profits increase as the ceiling is tightened. A calibration for the transportation secto shows that OPEC profits increase for reasonable carbon-ceiling values.
    • Political connections and insider trading, (with Thomas Bourveau and Marc Sangnier), AMSE, Working paper, 2016. (submitted)
      ABSTRACT: This paper investigates whether political connections affect individuals' propensity to engage in illegal activities in financial markets. We use the 2007 French presidential election as marker of change in the value of political connections, in a difference-in-differences research design. We examine the behavior of directors of publicly listed companies who are connected to the future president through campaign donations or direct friendships, relative to that of other non-connected directors, before and after the election. We uncover indirect evidence that connected directors do more illegal insider trading after the election. More precisely, we find that purchases by connected directors trigger larger abnormal returns, and that connected directors are more likely not to comply with trading disclosure requirements and to trade closer to major corporate events.

    • Rare Events and Risk Perception: Evidence from Fukushima Accident  (with Yanos Zylberberg), SSRN Working paper, 2016.
      ABSTRACT: We study changes in nuclear-risk perception following the Fukushima nuclear accident of March 2011. Using an exhaustive registry of individual housing transactions in England and Wales between 2007 and 2014, we implement a difference-in-difference strategy and compare housing prices in at-risk areas to areas further away from nuclear sites before and after Fukushima incident. We find a persistent price malus of about 3.5% in response to the Fukushima accident for properties close to nuclear plants. We show evidence that this price malus can be interpreted as a change in nuclear-risk perception. In addition, the price decrease is much larger for high-value properties within neighborhoods, and deprived zones in at-risk areas are more responsive to the accident. We discuss various theoretical channels that could explain these results.


Contact Information:





Renaud "dot" Coulomb "at" unimelb  "dot" edu "dot" au



+33 (0)6 88 13 38 16
+61 (0)4 02 91 01 89






Department of Economics
Level 4 Faculty of Business and Economics Building 105
The University of Melbourne
111 Barry Street Carlton VIC 3053