FairOnChain Consortium Meets at École polytechnique


On September 26, 2024, Blockchain@X Research Center, part of CREST, hosted the second in-person FairOnChain consortium meeting at the Alan Turing Building at INRIA on the École polytechnique campus.

The meeting brought together the principal investigators (PIs) and researchers involved in the FairOnChain project, an initiative focused on developing a fair and modular blockchain data infrastructure for open science and society. Participants included:

  • Prof. Julien Prat, CREST, École polytechnique
  • Prof. Marco Mattavelli, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • Prof. Arnaud Gaudinat, Haute École de Gestion de Genève
  • Prof. William Knottenbelt, Imperial College London
  • Christophe Lebrun, Haute École de Gestion de Genève
  • Madalina Sas, Imperial College London
  • Natkamon Tovanich, CREST, École polytechnique

During the meeting, the team updated the progress of ongoing work and detailed the planning for the next phase of the project. This included developments of a unified blockchain data structure and publicly accessible blockchain datasets aimed at enhancing data access, transparency, and reproducibility in blockchain research.

The team also discussed the technical work required to achieve the project goals and plans for the internal report submission to CHIST-ERA. Furthermore, they explored the possibility of upcoming publications resulting from the research within the consortium.

The meeting strengthened collaboration within this international team. Future meetings are planned for Lausanne, Switzerland, around January 2025, followed by a gathering in London, United Kingdom, in June 2025.

About FairOnChain Project

FairOnChain logo

The FairOnChain Project is a pioneering European research collaboration funded by the CHIST-ERA call for Open and Reusable Research Data and Software (ORD). Running from 2023 to 2025, this two-year initiative aims to overcome the technical barriers to accessing and analyzing blockchain data, promoting enhanced transparency and reproducibility in blockchain research.

FairOnChain presentation video

As part of this project, the FairOnChain team will contribute to the scientific community with:

  1. Publicly Accessible and Expandable Datasets: These will include structured, daily updated blockchain transaction data. Researchers can access raw blockchain transactions alongside enriched, community-maintained datasets in a uniform, open format, ensuring greater availability and reuse of this complex data.
  2. Open-Source Software Framework and Standardized APIs: This project aims to deliver a unified framework for researchers to query, annotate, and reference blockchain data effectively. Additionally, it will support the development of well-described, reusable workflows and pipelines to facilitate the exchange and replication of scientific results in line with the FAIR principles (fundability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) of open science.

By developing modular and scalable data infrastructure, FairOnChain aims to facilitate easier, open access to blockchain datasets, enabling researchers and society to benefit from trustworthy and reusable data for scientific discovery.

The consortium behind FairOnChain includes leading research institutions from France (École polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris), Switzerland (Haute École de Gestion de Genève, HES-SO and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and the United Kingdom (Imperial College London).

Each institution has received grants from its respective national research agencies to support this collaborative research project.

Federica Meluzzi, 2024 EALE Young Labor Economist Prize winner


CREST is proud to announce that Federica Meluzzi, a PhD candidate in Economics at CREST-GENES, has been awarded the 2024 EALE Young Labor Economist Prize.

Federica Meluzzi, PhD candidate at CREST specialized in labor economics.

Federica’s work is in labor economics at the intersection with public economics and education. Specifically, her research is on gender differences in the labor market, with a focus on how gender norms are transformed, either by public policies or with the social environment.

Federica will be going on the academic job market 2024 – 2025.

Follow Federica’s work here. 

The European Association of Labor Economists and the EALE Young Labor Economist Prize.

The European Association of Labor Economists (EALE) was founded in 1989 in order to promote the advancement of knowledge in the field of labor economics in Europe and elsewhere.

The EALE Young Labor Economist Prize is awarded by the EALE to recognize outstanding research in labor economics. It is awarded to a young economist, who has authored an excellent paper presented at the annuel EALE conference. The prize aims to highlight innovative contributions to the field and support the development of young researchers in labor economics. It is considered a prestigious honor within the academic community.

For the 2024 EALE Conference, Federica presented her paper “The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”.

“The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”.

Today, there is strong consensus on the importance of gender norms in explaining the residual gender gaps in the labor market. However, our understanding of the drivers of gender norms, and their implications for preferences, remain lacking. Her paper, “The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”, contributes to filling this gap by providing novel large-scale evidence on the effects of the social environment – specifically college classmates – as a driver of women’s early-career labor market decisions.

Using unique administrative and survey data covering all college students in Italy, this study leverages cross-cohort idiosyncratic variation in the geographical origins of peers within Master’s programs. The key finding is tat exposure to female classmates from areas with egalitarian gender norms significantly increases women’s labor supply, primarily through increased uptake of full-time jobs. The estimated peer effects are substantial, accounting for more than a third of the gender earnings gap.

Drawing on large-scale data on students’ job-search preferences and newly collected data on their beliefs, Federica shed light two main drivers of peer influence: (i) shifts in preferences for non-pecuniary job attributes, and (ii) social learning, particularly on the characteristics of the job offer distribution.

Other works.

Federica’s other works are on how the design of parental leave benefits affects households’ decisions to share parental leave, on the role of firlms in shaping the stickiness of gender norms, on the effects of pay transparency on within-firm pay premia, and on gender differences in the responsiveness to UI benefits.

Federica Meluzzi, winner of the 2024 EALE Young Labor Economist Prize


CREST is proud to announce that Federica Meluzzi, a PhD candidate in Economics at CREST-GENES, has been awarded the 2024 EALE Young Labor Economist Prize.

Federica Meluzzi, PhD candidate at CREST specialized in labor economics.

Federica’s work is in labor economics at the intersection with public economics and education. Specifically, her research is on gender differences in the labor market, with a focus on how gender norms are transformed, either by public policies or with the social environment.

Federica will be going on the academic job market 2024 – 2025.

Follow Federica’s work here. 

The European Association of Labor Economists and the EALE Young Labor Economist Prize.

The European Association of Labor Economists (EALE) was founded in 1989 in order to promote the advancement of knowledge in the field of labor economics in Europe and elsewhere.

The EALE Young Labor Economist Prize is awarded by the EALE to recognize outstanding research in labor economics. It is awarded to a young economist, who has authored an excellent paper presented at the annuel EALE conference. The prize aims to highlight innovative contributions to the field and support the development of young researchers in labor economics. It is considered a prestigious honor within the academic community.

For the 2024 EALE Conference, Federica presented her paper “The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”.

“The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”.

Today, there is strong consensus on the importance of gender norms in explaining the residual gender gaps in the labor market. However, our understanding of the drivers of gender norms, and their implications for preferences, remain lacking. Her paper, “The College Melting Pot: Peers, Culture and Women’s Job Search”, contributes to filling this gap by providing novel large-scale evidence on the effects of the social environment – specifically college classmates – as a driver of women’s early-career labor market decisions.

Using unique administrative and survey data covering all college students in Italy, this study leverages cross-cohort idiosyncratic variation in the geographical origins of peers within Master’s programs. The key finding is tat exposure to female classmates from areas with egalitarian gender norms significantly increases women’s labor supply, primarily through increased uptake of full-time jobs. The estimated peer effects are substantial, accounting for more than a third of the gender earnings gap.

Drawing on large-scale data on students’ job-search preferences and newly collected data on their beliefs, Federica shed light two main drivers of peer influence: (i) shifts in preferences for non-pecuniary job attributes, and (ii) social learning, particularly on the characteristics of the job offer distribution.

Other works.

Federica’s other works are on how the design of parental leave benefits affects households’ decisions to share parental leave, on the role of firlms in shaping the stickiness of gender norms, on the effects of pay transparency on within-firm pay premia, and on gender differences in the responsiveness to UI benefits.