Grants

The COVID-19 emergence has led to a pandemic with over 6.9 million estimated deaths worldwide [1]. The epidemic management in Europe including France has allowed reducing the expected burden of disease. This was achieved in particular by a combination of initial reduction of transmission via containment policies of variable stringency and, one year later, strongly incentivised high uptake of Covid-19 vaccines among the adult population, using vaccines with high and well-persisting effectiveness against severe forms of the disease. This period was marked by scientific, societal and political debate about the effectiveness, safety, feasibility, legitimacy, parsimony and fairness of a variety of preventive countermeasures (PCMs) and related policies. This illustrated the challenges to control emerging infectious diseases while maintaining trust among and between stakeholders and limiting social inequalities. While it can be argued that rapid biomedical innovation combined with strong incentives will successfully control future emerging infectious disease events, others question the high societal costs of this approach, in particular at the expenses of societal trust and equity.
A considerable body of social sciences and public health evidence has described the need to foster individuals’ confidence in decisions and actions, and to address social inequalities during epidemic response, and that preference-based recommendation, organisation at the local level including healthcare workers (HCWs) can help achieving these requirements. However, less is known about how this evidence can be operationalised and translated into public health practice during epidemic situations and, to achieve this, methodological frames are needed.

The ACME project aims to contribute to the development and implementation of effective, acceptable and accessible PCMs, including vaccination, specifically for use during epidemics of (re-)emerging infectious diseases in France. The vision is to identify and prepare, during epidemic preparedness activities, confidence-building and inclusive strategies and programmes. The ACME project responds to the PEPR frame by constructing a multidisciplinary research consortium of academic institutions in France who will use social sciences and public health methods to prepare for future emerging infectious disease epidemics. Our project corresponds to the Axis 2 (Knowledge, expertise, communication), as it aims at a better understanding of key factors that impact the acceptance and the physical and psychological accessibility of various PCMs in epidemic situations, and will recommend approaches for the translation of this evidence into public health action. Although programme development and implementation are member state competencies, PCM recommendations can be expected to be increasingly guided by European supranational entities, a dimension that will be taken into account in the ACME project through involvement of European stakeholders in specific steps.
The general objectives of the ACME project are to:
1.    Assess determinants, facilitators and barriers of uptake/adherence, confidence and social equity regarding PCMs in epidemic situations in France, and identify approaches to monitor these factors for epidemic preparedness that should be implemented in non-epidemic periods (WP1).
2.    Develop potential scenarios of epidemic diseases and relevant PCMs, and evaluate preferences around corresponding strategies and programmes among the general population, HCWs and other relevant subgroups (WP2).
3.    Prepare interventional research on confidence-building and inclusive PCM programmes in epidemic situations, by identifying experiences reported in France and elsewhere (case studies) and evaluate their transferability to an epidemic context in France (WP3).
4.    Develop recommendations and roadmaps towards strategies and programmes that assure acceptability and accessibility of PCMs during epidemic situations in France and Europe, elaborate pre-protocols (blueprints) for rapid implementation of interventional research in future emergencies, and prepare their transfer and implementation into research and public health action for epidemic preparedness (WP4).

Within the western world, social inequalities have increased over the last two decades. This reduces social welfare because of inequality aversion. In some countries, rising inequalities destabilizes the liberal democratic order, underlining the intensity of this inequality aversion. Still, there is no consensus among social scientists about how to value reducing inequalities when comparing different policy options. The central objective of this ANR project is to estimate the citizens’ willingness to pay for reducing inequality when placed “under the veil of ignorance”, and to provide operational evaluation guidelines and decision rules for policymakers confronted to different policy options to fight social inequalities. We will use a new experimental design to perform this task. A specific issue in this domain arises in the context of intergenerational transfers, as is the case for example in the domains of climate change, public debt and pension reforms. Intergenerational inequalities are generated by economic growth (or degrowth), and the discount rates used to evaluate public and private investment projects can be interpreted as expressing a form of intergenerational inequality aversion. Our experimental design will thus allow us to shed new light on the ongoing debate relative to the long-term discount rate, with application to the social cost of carbon for example. Finally, because this discount rate determines the firms’ cost of capital, the results of this ambitious research agenda are also useful to explore the allocation of capital in the economy. Because many public policies aimed at reducing inequalities have an adverse effect on economic growth and collective prosperity, it is crucial to determine how much prosperity we are collectively ready to give up in order to reduce inequalities. In short, what is our collective degree of inequality aversion? Surprisingly, the number of existing experimental studies on this crucial question is very limited, and all of them consider a transfer from the rich to the poor with some leaks. We will experimentally explore the hypothesis that more inequality aversion will emerge when submitting a transfer from the poor to the rich with some total gains, as many policies do these days. It is supported by our preliminary tests based on a survey without any financial incentive. This hypothesis is incompatible with the utilitarian approach in the theory of social choice. We will explore alternative resolutions of this potential puzzle by departing from the standard utilitarian model. In our different experimental designs, we will also explore the potential link between inequality aversion and risk aversion, two concepts that are equivalent under the “veil of ignorance” argument for impartiality. We will also apply our findings to evaluate long-term public investments and other policies involving intergenerational transfers, such as climate policies. In a growing economy, investing raises intergenerational inequalities, and the discount rate is the minimum rate of return necessary to compensate for this increase, in the spirit of our new experimental design. The Ramsey rule is a mathematical translation of this idea, but it is based on the standard utilitarian model. Our experimental results will be useful to revise this rule, together with the risk-adjustment of the efficient discount rate. Finally, we will apply our results to the evaluation of the optimal zero-net-emission electricity mix in 2050.

This project is built on the central hypothesis that sovereign debt sustainability is fundamentally shaped by exposure to extreme macroeconomic risks and structural instabilities, and that neglecting these features leads to a systematic underestimation of fiscal vulnerabilities and policy trade-offs. It shifts the analysis of public debt from an average-based perspective to a risk-based and distributional framework, capturing tail risks and state-dependent dynamics. The DeFT project proposes a unified framework to measure, model, and analyse sovereign debt risk from a risk-based and distributional perspective, explicitly accounting for extreme events, structural rigidities, and macro-financial linkages.

The IRN E3E is an international network comprising 7 partners across three countries (France, the United States, and Italy), coordinated by Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE, AMU & CNRS). It is designed as an initiative to consolidate and strengthen a team of researchers from three disciplines (economics, ecology, and mathematics), some of whom have collaborated for over 20 years. Their most recent shared research focus—which is also at the heart of this IRN E3E—is the development of conceptual and operational frameworks for controlling emerging and re-emerging epidemics.

The IRN E3E considers both the ecological and biological aspects as well as the economic dimensions of epidemic crises. It stands out due to its original mathematical foundations (accounting not only for individual economic behaviors within large, heterogeneous populations but also for strategic interactions between individuals from different socioeconomic sectors, as well as between individuals and public authorities). Additionally, it features an ambitious operationalization initiative for public policy, leveraging the most advanced statistical techniques and data science methods.

This project analyses how distance to the technological frontier shapes the effectiveness of public support for innovation. Its central argument is that frontier-adjacent firms respond more strongly to subsidies and generate larger spillovers through more basic research — justifying more concentrated targeting than a uniform instrument like the CIR (€7bn/year) can deliver. The project has three objectives. Objective 1 documents how firms build absorptive capacity through frontier knowledge intermediaries, exploiting the CIR subcontracting appendix and the proprietary CETIM panel (a Carnot institute covering ~10,000 firms), whose statutory levy provides an exogenous instrument for frontier knowledge exposure. Objective 2 measures how CIR responses vary with frontier distance, using the 2004 and 2008 reforms to causally identify the user-cost elasticity and its gradient across the absorptive capacity distribution. Objective 3 develops a structural welfare framework based on a user-cost model of R&D investment and the Marginal Value of Public Funds, applied to the full menu of available instruments (CIR, JEI, BPI subsidies, domestic and European competitive grants). A firm-level microsimulation maps instrument rules to effective R&D user costs; social returns are weighted by a multiplier combining absorptive capacity and spillover potential toward basic research. The project combines novel French administrative microdata with frontier quasi-experimental methods, and constitutes the first rigorous comparative welfare evaluation of the French innovation policy instrument menu.

The EMERALD project aims to develop interpretable and statistically robust methods that combine econometrics and machine learning (ML) to improve asset allocation, risk measurement, and ESG scoring models in high dimensional, temporally dependent financial data. Its objective is to integrate the predictive power of ML with the inferential rigor of econometrics to deliver reliable and transparent tools for ESG score construction, portfolio management and risk governance. The project addresses two major challenges in modern finance: the curse of dimensionality that affects the estimation of covariance and precision matrices, and the temporal dependence that undermines standard ML assumptions.
EMERALD is a multidisciplinary project that brings together 11 experienced researchers and 10 PhD students specializing in econometrics, finance, and applied mathematics. The consortium builds on more than a decade of collaboration through three ANR projects, Econom&Risk (2010-2013), MultiRisk (2016-2019), and MLEforRisk (2021-2025), which produced many joint publications, doctoral training, workshops, and major conferences in financial econometrics. Notably, MultiRisk was selected as a “flagship project” by the ANR for its 2020 annual report, confirming the scientific strength and cohesion of this network.

The roles played by migration and family formation for economic growth have been well studied by economists. Yet these aspects have tended to be examined separately, without considering the interaction between family formation and migration. This project seeks to understand the extent of this interaction and how it shaped economic development in Western Europe. To address this question we intend to build and explore a new dataset combining data from online genealogical websites (Geni and Geneanet) with other sources, notably censuses. We aim at answering three questions: (Q1) How does family members' decision to migrate in search of better economic opportunities depend on the stage of family formation? (Q2) How were these decisions shaped by the major economic and social transformations that Europe experienced since the mid-17th century? (Q3) How did family formation and migration decisions contribute to economic growth in Western Europe? The first stage in the project will tackle an ambitious collection of data to build (and de-bias) our novel dataset. The latter will allow us to follow around 700 million Europeans over the period 1640 to 1940, providing rich information from their birth to their death that will identify both family dynamics and migration patterns. The data will first be used to analyze how fertility and migration decisions shaped each other, with a particular focus on the economic returns to migration and the implications for social mobility. The project will also consider the gender dimension of these questions, as gender norms are both an important determinant of family outcomes and a result of population dynamics and location choices. Results from these individual-level analyses will allow us to answer Q1 and Q2. We will then use structural estimations to understand how family migration affects long-run economic growth both at the local and aggregate levels, in order to answer our third research question, Q3.

FISCAID proposes to use Uganda as an empirical case study to provide an in-depth analysis of the various mechanisms through which foreign assistance affects the fiscal behavior of the recipient country, focusing on public domestic expenditure and revenues at the national and sub-national levels as well as to revisit the macro-micro paradox of aid effectiveness. To this aim, we will mobilize administrative data from the Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development with empirical (econometrical) analyses addressing the following questions: i) to what extent aid is fungible and affects the fiscal behavior of the recipient government in a context of aid fragmentation and decentralization? ii) do those fiscal effects affect aid effectiveness and more generally development?

The project aims at developing and implementing new methods for appraising inequalities in human condition when those inequalities are multidimensional and/or ordinal. An important aspects of those considered inequalities concerns the opportunity to succeed. The project will contribute to these issues from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. On the theoretical side, we aim at enlarging to the multidimensional setting the ordinal notion of equalization underlying the Hammond principle of transfer and to examine, within that very same multidimensional setting, how can one combines aversion to correlation between variables and the concern for equalizing each of those variables in isolation. The objective of this research is to provide the policy analyst with easily usable criteria that enables the comparisons of alternatives states of affairs based on those considerations. The research will also identify plausible indicators of the "size of the cake" in an ordinal context which could serve as the analogue to the mean used for this purpose in a cardinal framework. As for opportunities, the aim will be again to complete the existing methods for identifying improvement and equalization of chances of success. We will also try to explain why the widespread aversion to inequality of opportunities does not translate - in the policy sphere - to a heavier taxation on inheritance and gains from loteries and gambles. On the empirical front, the research will perform an exhaustive appraisal of the relative performance of India and Europe (notably France) in reducing inequalities of opportunities between social groups formed on the basis of caste (in India) and country of birth (in Europe). The research will also apply robust methodologies for appraising the relative performance of private and public schools in providing to their pupils cognitive skills in a way that takes into account the differing social backgrounds of those pupils. The research will also examine, in China, the link between elitism and equality of opportunities to access university.

The Sea Water Air Conditioning (SWAC) technology, using deep-sea cold water, remains widely underutilized worldwide due to its limited understanding and requiring substantial investments. However, it efficiently air conditions existing buildings and districts and reduces consumption, power demand, and CO2 emissions by a factor of ten. In the context of climate change and successive heatwaves, the demand for active cooling equipment in buildings is expected to surge beyond the predictions made by the International Energy Agency in its 2018 'Future of Cooling' report.
This project proposes a multidisciplinary approach to identify and overcome any barriers that may hinder or limit the adoption of deep-sea water air conditioning (SWAC) technology, with the following operational objectives:
•    Identify and anticipate environmental, social, and societal barriers and obstacles.
•    Study the potential industrial and agricultural valorization of seawater discharges from the SWAC process.
•    Explore opportunities for utilizing the resource for cold/electricity co-generation.
•    Define integration strategies for these technologies in more sustainable buildings and districts.
•    Carry out multifactorial optimization, taking into account all relevant issues.
The project will provide new knowledge and tools for designing future SWAC installations and will highlight improvements for existing SWAC facilities. Through a multidisciplinary approach, it will enable the anticipation of potential barriers to the implementation of SWAC technology in all regions with cold water near the coasts. It will provide answers to energy, environmental, societal, and economic issues expected by designers and decision-makers. The MAEVA project will thus promote SWAC as a sustainable and resilient air conditioning technology."