Phd In Economics
CurrentAs part of my PhD, I have been involved in a variety of research projects:- As a MRes student, I first grew familiar with statistical software (Stata, R) by studying clans and cooperation in rural China with other fellow students. We found that informal cooperation promoted by dominant lineages did not substitute for more formal specialized producer cooperatives, but incentivized individual profit-seeking market behaviour by providing clan members with networking resources.- I wrote my MRes thesis on the impact of public primary education on skills in the UK during the Second Industrial Revolution. To do so, I leveraged the variation in time and space of the first free schooling reform in the country, by identifying schools on historical maps using computer vision with Python. I found a long-term upskilling of the labour force, mostly in the London metropolitan area.- I also briefly looked at the heterogeneous impact and optimal targeting of a place-based policy in France (enterprise zones), which allowed me to get a hand on GIS software (QGIS, ArcGIS).- I am currently completing the three chapters of my dissertation. The first one relies on an urban land use model that I developed in Python, in collaboration with CIRED, the World Bank and the City of Cape Town (South Africa): we have designed it to simulate the impact of various urban policies (urban edge, subsidized housing) and flood risks on spatial inequalities and housing markets, including informal settlements. The second one relies on a spatial job search model that I developed in Matlab and which allows me to study the link between informal employment and ubanization in South Africa. The third one is a meta-analysis of the literature on the estimation of spillovers that residents with different skill levels generate on local amenities and productivities, a key parameter when designing optimal local tax policies.
