Research

Exploring revenues of Smart Cities: Evidence from 123 Belgian municipalities "with Fateh Belaïd, Djida Bounazef" 

Smart cities promise to address the various environmental and social challenges and make cities more sustainable, resilient, eco, and livable. Building on this assumption, this paper explores the benefits of smart cities, including both tangible and intangible outcomes.

It implements an empirical approach based on an original survey conducted in three Belgian regions. The results show that Belgian municipalities that have developed Smart City projects have realized significant intangible benefits such as citizen involvement and quality of life. In addition, the findings document that the degree of progress of smart city projects is a crucial variable in shaping the benefits and that budgetary constraints represent a hindrance to the generation of benefits. From a policy perspective, such analysis is beneficial in informing the policymaking process. It can help evaluate the performance of smart cities and develop a new vision to improve the design of cost-effective projects.

Keywords: Smart City; Economic benefits; Social benefits; Belgium.

Fintech Development and Firm Technological Innovation Efficiency: Empirical Empirical Findings in China: With XU Yong, YUAN Ling, LEE Hyoungsuk, Joanna Nakonieczny, Xin Zhao

 IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2023, vol. 71, p. 3881-3891.  

 As a new combination of finance and technology, fintech not only makes people's daily life more convenient but also brings new opportunities for firm growth. Yet, although multiple parties in society have benefited tremendously from the development of fintech, its actual impact on FTIE remains unclear. For this purpose, we adopted a two-way fixed-effect model and considered the data of A-share-listed companies from 2011 to 2019 to analyze the impact of fintech development on FTIE in China and its associated mechanism. We found that fintech development negatively affected FTIE by increasing business risks and debt pressures through risk transmission and regulatory arbitrage, respectively. This finding remains robust after using instrumental variable tests and adopting Poisson and Tobin regression models. Furthermore, such negative impacts are higher for firms in the eastern region, nonmanufacturing firms, and state-owned enterprises. Our findings contribute significantly to the literature on technological innovation and financial regulation by shedding light on the negative impacts of the dominating fintech development on FTIE. 

Household Financial Flows: Evidence from Madagascar with Ahmed Tritah.

Revue économique,  vol. 70, no. 5, 2019, pp. 847-871. 

Mobile money is expanding rapidly across the African continent with the potential to raise financial inclusiveness. In this paper we investigate the impact of the introduction of mobile money in 2010 on the amount and frequency of funds sent and received among Malagasy households. We use a selection model combined with an instrumental variable approach to deal with the selective participation into the transfer market and the endogeneity of mobile money adoption. We show that access to mobile money has triggered more financial transactions between households at both the extensive (number of potential users) and intensive margin (level of funds). Our results suggest that transactions costs are important and act as barriers to entry for the poor. The advent of new communication technologies has the potential to alleviate these barriers and bring into secure financial transactions a large segment of a previously excluded population.

Non-academic publications:

Fuel poverty analysis in the light of the PHEBUS inquiry with Fateh Belaid and Olivier Teissier (2015).  In french 

Cet article vise à caractériser les ménages en précarité énergétique à partir des indicateurs retenus par l’Observatoire national de la précarité énergétique (ONPE) et calculés d’après l’enquête performance de l'habitat, équipements, besoins et usages de l'énergie (Phébus). Celle-ci présente l’intérêt d’approfondir la connaissance du phénomène de précarité énergétique, en offrant un indicateur synthétique de la performance énergétique des logements des ménages concernés (le diagnostic de performance énergétique - DPE) et de nouvelles variables liées aux pratiques des ménages (restriction de chauffage, difficultés de paiement, usages du chauffage). L’analyse confirme que les indicateurs retenus sont très liés aux caractéristiques socio-économiques et, dans une moindre mesure, aux caractéristiques du logement.