Economics

New Faces, New Ideas: CREST’s 2026-2027 Newcomers
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New offices to find, new colleagues to meet, new projects to launch this is what the start of the academic year looks like for the researchers, postdocs, PhD students, and visiting scholars joining CREST this fall.

Coming from different countries and academic traditions, they will spend the coming months – or years – contributing to our four research areas: economics, sociology, statistics, and finance-insurance, while bringing their own scientific culture to the lab.

Here is an introduction to this year’s newcomers.

Researchers

This year, several new researchers are joining CREST, strengthening our core faculty and bringing new perspectives across our disciplines.

Marshall Taylor – Computational Sociology (Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI)
Marshall Taylor joins CREST from New Mexico State University, where he was an Associate Professor of Sociology and led the C3 Lab. His research explores questions of cognition and measurement in the sociology of culture, with a particular focus on how cultural knowledge is structured and studied.

More information here.

Juliette Saetre – Sociology (Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI)
Juliette Saetre arrives from Toulouse School of Economics, where she was an IAST Postdoctoral Research Fellow; she received her PhD from the European University Institute. Her research examines how political attitudes and behaviors diffuse through migrant populations, reshaping political dynamics in receiving communities, with a broader interest in protest and collective action, migration, social networks, and diffusion.

More information here.

Camille Urvoy – Economics (École polytechnique)
Camille Urvoy is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Mannheim; she received her PhD from Sciences Po in 2021. Her work sits at the intersection of media economics and political economy. Camille Urvoy will join CREST in January 2027.

More information here.

Maxim Sandiumenge-i-Boy – Economics (Télécom Paris)
Maxim Sandiumenge-i-Boy joins CREST as Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2026, following his PhD in Economics at Toulouse School of Economics. His research spans industrial organization, competition policy, computational methods, and machine learning.

More information here.

Elliot Motte – Economics (Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI)
Elliot Motte received his PhD from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in June 2026. He will first take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of New South Wales in Fall 2026, before joining CREST-ENSAI as Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2027. A political economist, he is particularly interested in how media shapes public beliefs and behaviors.

More information here.

Guillermo Alonso Alvarez – Finance-Insurance (Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI)
Guillermo Alonso Alvarez joins the Finance-Insurance team as Assistant Professor in Fall 2026. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and received his PhD from Illinois Institute of Technology. His research interests include stochastic control, contract theory, mean-field games, machine learning, and financial and actuarial mathematics.

More information here.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Our new postdoctoral researchers are contributing to ongoing projects and launching their own work in close collaboration with CREST teams.

  • Davide Bordoli, Economics, with Olivier Gossner.
  • Nassim Bourarach, Statistics
  • Julia Francesca Engel, Economics, with Yves Le Yaouanq.
  • David Heredia, Statistics, with Sébastien Da Veiga
  • Arouna Kouandou, Statistics-Computer Science, ATER position
  • Luisa Lore, Economics, with Matias Nunez.
  • Grégoire Jacquemin, Finance-Insurance, with Olivier Lopez.
  • Joao Miguel Machado, Statistics, with Anna Korba.
  • Hugo Martin, Statistics-Computer Science, ATER position
  • Siwan Boufadène, Statistics, with Anna Korba.
  • Martin Rouault, Statistics, with Anna Korba.
  • Remi Castera, Statistics, with Vianney Perchet.
  • Emmanuel Esposito, Statistics, with Vianney Perchet.

PhD Students

This year, we welcome a new cohort of PhD students who are beginning their research journeys within our vibrant academic community.

23 new PhD students are joining CREST across our research clusters: 6 in the Economics team, 3 in Finance-Insurance, 10 in Statistics, and 4 in Sociology. 2 of them will join us on the CREST-ENSAI campus in Bruz, while the rest will be based at the CREST-ENSAE Paris or Télécom Paris campuses in Palaiseau.

Visiting Researchers and PhD Students

CREST is also hosting 13 visiting researchers and PhD students this year, joining us for research stays that foster international collaboration.

  • Gerard Camats Penella, PhD student at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, joins the Economics team to work with Giovanni Ricco on monetary policy and financial markets.
  • Clara-Marie Pache, PhD student at Leipzig University, Germany, joins the Economics team to work with Pierre Boyer on the relationship between scientific evidence and public policymaking.
  • Mahmut Sefa Ipek, PhD student at Bilkent University, Turkey, joins the Economics team to work with Giovanni Ricco on monetary policy transmission and macroeconomic dynamics.
  • Léopold Dubreuil, Public Administrator, France, joins the Economics team to work with Pierre Boyer on corporate taxation and fiscal integration in the European Union.
  • Bertille Antoine, researcher at Simon Fraser University, Canada, joins the Economics team to work with Xavier d’Haultfœuille on econometrics and financial econometrics.
  • András Fülöp, researcher at ESSEC Business School, France, joins the Statistics team to work with Nicolas Chopin on Bayesian inference methods for econometrics and finance.
  • Anna Rae George, PhD student at the University of Oxford, UK, joins the Sociology team to work with Etienne Ollion on computational approaches to online communication.
  • Julia Pickersgill, PhD student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Switzerland, joins the Economics team to work with Enrico Rubolino on gender inequality and public policy.
  • Anna Pajola, PhD student at Bielefeld University, Germany, joins the Finance-Insurance team to work with Roxana Dumitrescu on mean-field games and stochastic control.
  • Jiayu Liu, PhD student at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, Germany, joins the Statistics team to work with Vianney Perchet on learning-augmented online algorithms.
  • Taylor Brenden Alarcon, PhD student at Columbia University, USA, joins the Sociology team to work with Hesu Yoon on gentrification and the use of urban public space.
  • Carla Ruggiu, PhD student at Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, joins the Economics team to work with Enrico Rubolino on work-family trade-offs and fertility.
  • Louise Brandily, PhD student at Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, joins the Economics team to work with Pierre Boyer on public budgetary frameworks.

Giovanni Ricco Appointed Programme Director of CEPR’s Monetary Economics and Fluctuations Programme
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Giovanni Ricco, Professor at École Polytechnique and member of CREST, has taken over as Programme Director of the Monetary Economics and Fluctuations (MEF) programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), effective 1 September 2026. He succeeds Refet Gürkaynak (Bilkent University), who led the programme for six years.

The MEF programme is one of CEPR’s core research areas, bringing together economists working on monetary policy, central banking, and business cycles — from the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy and the interaction between macroeconomic aggregates and central bank decisions, to the propagation of shocks, recessions, and stabilisation policy.

As Programme Director, Giovanni Ricco will coordinate the programme’s network of Fellows and Affiliates, its research agenda, and its events, which include the Macroeconomic Policy in Emerging Markets conference, ESSIM, the MEF Programme Meeting at the Study Center Gerzensee, and the Winter Symposium in Paris.

Giovanni Ricco holds a PhD in Economics from the London Business School and a PhD in Physics from the University of Pisa. He is Professor at École Polytechnique, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, and Chercheur Associé at the OFCE (Sciences Po). His research focuses on empirical macroeconomics and time-series econometrics, with a particular focus on the identification and transmission of monetary policy shocks. He is also a member of the CEPR-EABCN Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee and an Associate Editor of the European Economic Review. In 2024, he received the American Economic Journal Best Paper Award in Macroeconomics for “The Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks,” co-authored with Silvia Miranda-Agrippino.

Within CEPR’s research architecture, MEF succeeded the former International Macroeconomics programme, alongside the International Macroeconomics and Finance (IMF) and Macroeconomics and Growth (MG) programmes.

CREST warmly congratulates Giovanni Ricco on this appointment, which reflects the international standing of the laboratory’s research in macroeconomics and monetary economics.