CREST-Ecole polytechnique researcher Pierre Boyer is among the recipients of the 2026 Schmölders Stiftung Prize, awarded for the paper “Pareto-improving Tax Reforms and the Earned Income Tax Credit”, co-authored with Felix J. Bierbrauer and Emanuel Hansen.
Awarded by the Finance Committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, the prize recognizes outstanding contributions in behavioral economics with a connection to public finance. The 2026 edition highlights a paper published in Econometrica in 2023, which proposes a new framework to identify Pareto-improving tax reforms and establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence.
In their work, the authors revisit the introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the United States in 1975 and show that, while the reform improved outcomes for some households, it did not constitute a true Pareto improvement. Their analysis also demonstrates how alternative designs of earned income subsidies could potentially generate reforms benefiting all individuals. Beyond this historical application, the paper opens new perspectives for the analysis of tax and transfer systems.
The Schmölders Stiftung jury particularly praised the paper for combining economic theory, institutional expertise, and evidence-based policy analysis, in line with the tradition of behavioral public economics inspired by Günter Schmölders.
Pierre Boyer is Full Professor of Economics at École polytechnique and researcher at CREST. His research focuses notably on public economics, political economy, taxation, and the evaluation of public policies.