Research

Fields of interest: Education Economics, Political Economy, Experimental Economics

Publications

This study empirically examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university students’ enrollment behaviors using a comprehensive database of university enrollments from 2012 to 2022. Our analysis reveals a 3.7% decline in the probability of re-enrollment for the subsequent academic year among the first cohort affected by the pandemic. This effect is particularly pronounced among students entering university, as well as among non-free lunch students, international students, and male students. The medium-term analysis indicates that the pandemic led to a significant shift in enrollment behaviors, decreasing the likelihood of enrolling in subsequent years and reducing graduation rates two years after the pandemic. Moreover, we find that exposure to stricter lockdown policies led to a 3.8% decrease in enrollment behaviors. We investigate three potential mechanisms: (i) exposure to the pandemic, (ii) labor market opportunities, and (iii) university quality. However, we find little evidence to support that these factors are significantly associated with changes in enrollment behaviors. These findings contribute to our understanding of the disruptive consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ educational trajectories and highlight its lasting impact on enrollment behaviors.


In this paper, we investigate how soft skills are related to educational achievement. We run a lab in the field experiment with pupils in Middle Schools to ask whether altruism, cooperation, willingness to compete and intrinsic motivation influence educational attainment. We find that willingness to compete is a strong predictor of individual educational achievement, while altruism is on the contrary negatively correlated with pupils’ success. Family background is a strong predictor of educational attainment. After controlling for individual and social preferences, we find that girls outperform boys.


Substantial heterogeneity in behavioral traits has been observed across human societies, which have been linked to important differences in individual as well as societal outcomes. In this paper, we complement the existing literature by investigating the role of key behavioral traits, i.e. risk-taking, patience, altruism, and trust, at the population level in the design of new policies and institutions during an unexpected global crisis. Combining granular data on policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis with several pre-pandemic survey measures of behavioral traits in 109 countries, we observe robust relationships of significant magnitude. In particular, our findings underline that countries with higher levels of trust tended to respond later to the crisis; while populations that are patient, altruistic, and trusting are more likely to implement stringent policies in the medium and long-term. These results improve our understanding of how countries deal with global crises. They also supply an explanation for the lack of coordinated response at the international level during such events.


Note: Member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration

With the help of more than 700 reviewers, we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hardware and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95% of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced. However, for 29% of articles, at least part of the data set was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample reduces the share of reproduced articles to 68%. These figures represent a significant increase compared with the period before the introduction of the disclosure policy, where only 12% of articles voluntarily provided replication materials, of which 55% could be (largely) reproduced. Substantial heterogeneity in reproducibility rates across different fields is mainly driven by differences in data set accessibility. Other reasons for unsuccessful reproduction attempts include missing code, unresolvable code errors, weak or missing documentation, and software and hardware requirements and code complexity. Our findings highlight the importance of journal code and data disclosure policies and suggest potential avenues for enhancing their effectiveness. 


Working papers :

This study investigates the influence of social pressure on reinforcing social normsamong adolescents through a lab-in-the-field experiment. Using a controlled environmentwhere teenagers interact with their classmates, I examine the evolution of cooperation, akey aspect of prosocial behavior, over repeated interactions and explore its determinants. Ifind that girls and altruistic pupils demonstrate higher levels of cooperation. Additionally,the introduction of non-monetary rewards and punishments, serving as forms of socialpressure, significantly enhances cooperation among adolescents, aligning their behaviorwith prevailing social norms. Surprisingly, the study finds that the intensity of socialpressure does not directly impact cooperation, suggesting that adolescents adapt theirpro-social behavior in response to social pressure awareness. These findings contributeto a comprehensive understanding of the driving forces behind adherence to social normsand their influence on adolescent behavior. 


This paper provides descriptive evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced secondary school students' application patterns to higher education in France, offering insights into the reallocation of preferences across academic fields and degree types. Using detailed administrative data, we document significant shifts in application shares during 2021, with increased interest in competitive tracks and concurrent declines in applications to bachelor's and vocational programs. These findings suggest that students responded to the pandemic by favoring structured and selective pathways with clear labor market prospects, while moving away from generalist degrees. Students' share of applications to STEM degrees increased, while applications to health and business programs remained stable. At the same time, analyzing the probability of applying to at least one program in a given field or degree reveals a decline in application diversification, as students concentrated their choices in fewer fields, reflecting a more risk-averse and selective approach in response to the pandemic. Our analysis highlights substantial heterogeneity in these effects across demographic groups.

with Rustam Romaniuc (MBS) & 34 others [Pre-registration] [Link]

R&R JEBO

There is a significant gap in turnout between young people and older voters. The failure to instill a voting habit at an early age may have long term consequences in terms of future political participation as well as on other civic behaviors. Using a pre-registered online experiment with 3,790 subjects, we implemented behavioral interventions aiming to stimulate youth turnout in the 2022 French presidential election. We also provide evidence on the effect of one behavioral intervention on youth turnout in a less salient election, the French legislative election that took place two months after the Presidential one. The results from the two experiments show the absence of any differences in turnout between the baseline and the treatment conditions. We investigate several mechanisms that can explain our results. 


with Cathleen Petit (FRB) & Valentin Journe (Adam Mickiewicz University) [Link]

Biodiversity loss demands urgent action, and protected area are one of the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation measure. While conservation efforts are known to be driven by economic and political factors, there is an absence of literature addressing the potential role played by behavioural traits at the population level. We investigated how population-level behavioural traits influence the proportion of terrestrial protected area by using large-scale cross-cultural surveys and geospatial data from 75 countries. We show that behavioural traits explain more variation in protected area coverage than economic indicators alone. Furthermore, trust is negatively associated with protected area coverage at the country level, suggesting that high-trust societies rely more on informal conservation practices. These findings challenge conventional models focused on economic and governance drivers and highlight the need for policies that align with population behaviours. Integrating behavioural insights into conservation planning could unlock more effective biodiversity conservation strategies in the era of environmental changes.

Funding : This project received a grant from the MSH Paris Nord


with D. Masclet & T. Penard [Link]

Submitted

L'objectif de cet article est de présenter une revue de littérature des expériences en économie menées auprès d'enfants et d'adolescents. Ces expériences en laboratoire, principalement réalisées sur le terrain ("lab-in-the-field") permettent d'étudier les préférences et les décisions de populations plus jeunes et plus hétérogènes que dans les expériences classiques (auprès de populations étudiantes). Les principaux enseignements de ces études sont que les préférences individuelles et sociales comme l'aversion pour le risque, la coopération et l'altruisme évoluent avec l'âge. Ces résultats soulignent l'importance d'adapter les politiques publiques qui ciblent les enfants et adolescents, en prenant en compte les spécificités de leurs préférences.



Selected Work in Progress :


This paper examines the underlying factors driving teachers' gendered behaviors. We present findings from an online experiment designed to measure these behaviors and explore two potential influences: gender preferences and gender stereotypes. A total of 1,898 teachers assessed randomly assigned fictitious school transcripts in which gender was varied. To capture gender preferences, teachers first participated in a series of dictator games, followed by an implicit association test to assess gender stereotypes. Our results indicate that while teachers do not appear to have gender preferences, they do hold gender stereotypes.  We propose a conceptual framework linking these two aspects in a way that allows to predict gendered assessments. Using evaluations from about 19,000 transcripts, we find no evidence of gendered assessments across a wide range of transcript profiles. These findings suggest that gender disclosure alone does not lead to biased assessments; instead, biases are more likely to arise in direct student-teacher interactions.

Funding : This project received a grant from the EUR Paris Jourdan Sciences Eco and from the Women in Science Chair from University Paris Dauphine


In secondary education, marking holds a pivotal role in shaping students’ academic trajectories and, ultimately, their labor prospects. Grades serve as a compass guiding students, parents, educators, and institutions in navigating the path toward educational success. Crucially, the fairness and reliability of this process depends on the accuracy of the grades themselves. So how accurate are these grades?  This study provides an analysis of the amount of noise (i.e., undesirable variation) in teachers’ ratings of students’ profiles. We will estimate the amount of noise via an incentivized online noise audit of 1,000 professional teachers in France who will be asked to grade 10 fictitious profiles from highschool students on a cardinal scale from 0 to 30, as well as using an ordinal scale from 1 to 7. This exercise will provide a quantitative estimate of the amount of variation in students’ ratings which is due to the random assignment to a teacher relative to actual differences in the students’ profiles. 


[Data collection]


[Design]