Marion Brouard, Young CREST Graduate, Honored with Two Prestigious Awards

Leave a comment

Marion Brouard, who defended her PhD thesis at CREST in 2025 under the supervision of Pierre Boyer and Camille Landais, has just received two distinctions recognizing the quality of her work in public and labor economics.

The Institut Polytechnique de Paris Thesis Award

At the doctoral graduation ceremony on April 28, 2026, Marion Brouard received the Best PhD Thesis Award of the Economics Department at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, worth €3,000, for her thesis “Three Essays on Inequalities by Age, Migration, and Gender.”

The thesis explores, in three parts, mechanisms of inequality that are often difficult to observe directly:

  • Financial support for young adults. Using anonymized banking data on 500,000 individuals (in collaboration with Crédit Mutuel), Marion Brouard shows that for every euro of public assistance paid to 18-25 year-olds, parents reduce their own support by only about 10 cents: public aid therefore complements family support rather than replacing it. She also shows that easing financial constraints encourages young people to continue their studies.
  • Migrants’ job search. Drawing on Swedish administrative data, she shows that migrants do not search for jobs any less actively than natives, but rather lack information about the most effective search strategies.
  • The gender pay gap after childbirth. A survey of 3,000 graduate mothers reveals that this gap stems from a mix of material constraints — childcare, work flexibility — and personal preferences shaped by social norms.

The Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award

A few weeks earlier, Marion Brouard had already been recognized at the CESifo Area Conference on Public Economics 2026, held in Munich from April 15 to 17. She received the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, which honors the best paper presented by a young researcher at the conference.

The award was given for her Job Market Paper, “Welfare Effects of Increasing Social Assistance to Young Adults: Theory and Evidence from France” — a paper that builds directly on the first part of her thesis on financial support for young adults.

A Young Researcher Already Making Her Mark

After a research stay at the University of California, Berkeley in spring 2024, Marion Brouard is now continuing her research as a postdoctoral researcher at the ifo Center for Public Economics and LMU Munich, while also collaborating with France’s Conseil d’Analyse Économique.

CREST congratulates Marion Brouard on these two distinctions, which confirm the impact of her work on inequality and redistribution policy.