June was a busy and rewarding month for CREST’s doctoral community. Within the space of two weeks, PhD students took the lead in organizing two research events: the annual PhD Workshop for first-year economics students, and the very first edition of the Junior Finance Research Day. Together, they offer a good snapshot of a doctoral community that is active, well organized, and genuinely invested in its own scientific life.

PhD Workshop: a yearly tradition for first-year economists

On June 22 and 23, CREST hosted its annual PhD Workshop for first-year economics PhD students. This yearly event gives every first-year student the chance to present their ongoing research to the entire lab, faculty and fellow PhD students alike. It is also one of the last convivial moments of the academic year, with an afterwork and a shared meal bringing the group together outside the seminar room.

For first-year students, the workshop is a real opportunity: presenting their work in front of an audience, gathering valuable feedback from both senior researchers and peers, and discovering the research topics and methods of their colleagues. These exchanges, spanning different fields of economics, often spark ideas for future collaborations and give students their first experience presenting in a formal workshop setting.

Over the two days, the programme covered an impressive range of topics — from monetary policy and the green transition to firm-level innovation, matching theory, demography and the family, labor economics, and environmental economics — a good illustration of just how broad the research interests of CREST’s younger generation already are.

Between sessions, the coffee breaks played their usual essential role: moments of connection between PhD students and faculty, fostering informal discussions about the presentations and sparking new scientific conversations.

Junior Finance Research Day: a new tradition takes shape

New this year: the first Junior Finance Research Day brought together PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members from the Finance group at CREST for a full day of presentations and scientific exchange. Organized jointly with the Financial Mathematics Seminar — itself a sign of the collaborative spirit driving the initiative — the event gave junior researchers the opportunity to present their ongoing work, receive feedback from peers and faculty, and engage in discussion across a broad spectrum of finance research.

Unlike workshops devoted exclusively to first-year PhD students, this event deliberately brought together researchers at different stages of their academic careers, widening the conversation and the range of perspectives in the room.

One of the defining features of the day was the sheer variety of research topics on display, from sustainable finance and climate risk to financial mathematics and econometrics, combining theoretical modelling, quantitative analysis and advanced statistical techniques. Presentations included Ruben Haalebos on carbon-intensity factor models for portfolio choice, Reda Alami Chentoufi on Graphical LASSO for MGARCH models, Thomas Peyrat on Malliavin calculus applied to cyber risk, Davide Stocco on blended finance for biodiversity conservation, Grégoire Jacquemin on the statistical modelling of compound climate events, Lishu Zhang on critical raw material dependency risk, Carolina Moura on how financial markets react to climate compound events, Laura D’Andolfi on a new probabilistic approach to mean field games of optimal stopping, and Richard Ahouansou on neural network estimation of extreme value copulas.

Beyond the presentations themselves, a second, equally important goal of the day was to strengthen the sense of community within the Finance group — encouraging collaboration, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and laying the groundwork for future research interactions.

A community that organizes itself

What stands out across both events is that they were designed, driven and run by the doctoral students themselves. From building the programme to coordinating logistics and bringing colleagues from different cohorts and specialties together, this June’s events reflect a PhD community at CREST that is not only large and diverse, but proactive in creating its own spaces for exchange, feedback and collaboration — a strong sign of the collective dynamism running through the lab’s next generation of researchers.

Thank you to the PhD organizers for these two events, Laurine Meier, Hervé Darricau, Laura D’Andolfi, and Eugenio Parigi!