Julien Combe (CREST – École polytechnique): Market Design and Participation: Comprehensive Design for Matching Markets (MADPART)

Julien Combe, a Professor at École polytechnique, is a permanent researcher at CREST and an affiliated researcher at the Institut des Politiques Publiques and the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). After obtaining his PhD from the Paris School of Economics in 2017, he worked as a Research Associate at University College London before joining CREST. Julien specializes in economics, particularly in theoretical and empirical market design.

In his current research, Julien explores dynamic centralized matching markets. He also examines how external options affect participation in matching markets. This research laid the groundwork for his ERC project by highlighting the need to incorporate these outside options into the design of these matching markets. These studies have opened new perspectives on designing more effective and inclusive policies.

“The ERC Starting Grant will allow me to push ambitious projects by allowing me to create an effective team of research around the topic with research assistants, a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student. It will also allow me to fund an intervention to understand how families react to information in their participation decisions to daycare assignment procedures which would not have been possible otherwise. Last, it will also give the means to organize various events to gather researchers from the field and help to making the Parisian area a true European and world hub for Market Design.”

The ERC project MADPART aims to improve the design of assignment markets by considering external options and participation decisions. Many assignment markets, such as those for public school teachers, daycare placements, organ allocations, and social housing, operate with limited or no monetary transfers and are influenced by external opportunities. MADPART seeks to understand how these outside options discourage participation and undermine policy objectives, while also identifying innovative designs to enhance market functioning. By combining advanced theoretical models with cutting-edge empirical methods, the project will leverage unique and novel datasets from four assignment markets to analyze dynamic interactions with external options. The expected outcomes of MADPART aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of assignment markets and potentially lead to significant policy innovations, allowing for better public resource allocation strategies that account for the choice of participants among multiple options.

Funded by the European Union (ERC STG 101162014). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.

Marion Goussé (CREST – GENES – ENSAI): Skills Markets: Marriage and Labor (SkiM2Lab)

Marion Goussé is an Associate Professor of Economics at ENSAI, permanent researcher at CREST in Bruz. She obtained her PhD from Sciences Po Paris and previously was a professor at Laval University in Canada. Marion is also a research affiliate at Institut des Politiques Publiques, IZA and she is a member of AFEPOP (Association Française des Économistes de la Population) and a network member of HCEO.

Marion Goussé’s previous research primarily addressed themes in labor and family economics. Her work focused on the determinants of labor income inequality, analyzing both intra-household dynamics and broader labor market patterns. She has applied advanced econometric techniques to understand the interplay between marriage markets, labor supply, and home production. This line of inquiry laid a strong foundation for her ERC project, demonstrating significant findings such as the impact of marriage market dynamics on labor supply decisions and the economic outcomes of households. Her current research continues to explore these themes, particularly examining how discrimination and family structures affect labor market outcomes.

“The ERC grant represents a unique opportunity to me to build an international team of researchers around my project with two postdocs, two PhDs students and with collaborators from Canada, Luxembourg and Sweden. This project is intensive in human capital as we will need to build, solve and estimate complex structural household matching models of the labor market using very rich databases. The project’s results will help answer broad impactful questions around the persistence and evolution of gender and regional gaps in skills, wages and marriage rates.”

Samuel Rufat (CREST – École polytechnique): Filling the Behavioral Gap in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation (FiBeGa)

Samuel Rufat is a Professor of Geography at École polytechnique who recently joined the social sciences group of the CREST. He holds a joint European PhD from ENS Lyon and University of Bucharest, and a Habilitation from University Paris Cité. His research interests include urban geography, environmental inequalities, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and computational social science. He is an expert with the Community of European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS) Disaster Resilient Societies group for the European Commission. Previously, he was a Professor of Geography at CY Clergy Paris University and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.

His current research explores the empirical validation of social vulnerability and resilience assessments and the role of human behavior in disaster outcomes. This research had laid the groundwork for an ERC project, which aims to refine the models and understanding of the impacts of disasters and climate change on metropolises, thereby informing more effective risk reduction strategies and adaptation policies.

“Competing theories from different fields are usually implemented on different case studies or respondents instead of being empirically compared. Some assume that risk awareness or information campaigns will lead to mitigation behavior, but the opposite has been repeatedly verified. This ERC grant allows for cross-validation, testing multiple theories from different fields, across different case studies, in space, short-term and long-term. Such an European funding is also the best opportunity to involve stakeholders from every level, from local authorities and citizen representatives to the European level, to inform policies, emergency management and male them more efficient, saving lives and public money.”

The FiBeGa project, “Filling the Behavioral Gap in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation”, aims to address a critical gap in current risk assessment methodologies: the lack of consideration for actual human behavior. Despite significant investments in disaster risk reduction, current policies often fail to reduce risks and losses effectively due to a mismatch between theoretical models and empirical reality. The EU vision of a disaster-and climate-resilient society cannot be achieved with the current approach. The ERC-funded FiBeGa project will lift existing barriers to predicting risk perception and behavior to foster a shift from “behavior-blind” to “behavior-aware” assessments and policies. By focusing on four major urban centers – Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest – the project will create demonstrators that provide a scalable and transferable model for improving disaster preparedness and response across diverse contexts. The outcomes of the FiBeGa project will include interactive, spatially explicit simulations that allow decision-makers to visualize and refine their strategies in real-time, fostering more resilient and adaptive communities in the face of increasing climate risks.

Funded by the European Union (ERC CoG 101044374). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.