Economics serving society

Job Market 2015-2016 at PSE: who are Sarah Fleche, Gabor Katay and Pauline Rossi?

Throughout October and November, we will present you PSE Job Market candidates for 2015-2016.

Every week, PSE candidates introduce their path and research interests :

What is the Job Market ? Every year, some PhD and post-doc students of the Paris School of Economics decide to be candidate on the Job Market. Sort of an international labour exchange, the Job Market allows candidates to apply for universities and institutions in many countries. PSE candidates receive a specific support program, which enables them to prepare at best their applications, the recruitment interviews, the presentation workshops etc.

  • To access the official web page in which all PSE candidates to 2015-2016 Job Market are presented (Research fields, Job Market papers, CV,...), click here.

Sarah Fleche

« Educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, I receveid my PhD from the Paris School of Economics in October 2014. Now, I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Since 2010 I have also been occasional consultant at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the Economics Department and Statistics Directorate, and I am currently involved in the well-being observatory at CEPREMAP.

My research interests focus on welfare analysis (through subjective well-being measures) to provide evidence on how public policies can improve individual well-being through public service delivery, health policies, schooling environments and the relationship of well-being to time allocations.

My Job Market paper takes advantage of a quasi-natural experiment wherein 19 quasi-randomly selected cantons in Switzerland have implemented centralisation reforms between 2000 and 2012 in a broad range of domains (e.g. health, education, social affairs, etc.). I find evidence that reduced local autonomy has a negative effect on people’s well-being and this negative effect is mainly driven by people’s feeling of losing political influence. This is not compensated by higher quality in public services. In addition, voter turnout has shifted downwards by 3 percentage points in cantons that implemented a centralisation reform. While most of the literature on decentralisation has focused on the government’s performance, this study shows that the political economy of public service delivery matters for people’s well-being.

My research also explores different ways to measure individual well-being including evaluative concepts (such as declared life satisfaction) and experienced well-being (using time use surveys). With a group of researchers at the London School of Economics, I examine the development of well-being over the life cycle and attempt to determine when public policies are the most effective across the lifespan. In particular, I examine the importance of teachers in UK primary schools using matched pupil-teacher survey data and show that teachers are important inputs in pupil cognitive skills but also pupil emotional health and social behaviours.

Since 2012, I have been invited to present my work internationally. In particular, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the Tinbergen Institute in Rotterdam and I have taken part in different international conferences. Since 2013, I have also been giving lectures on « Happiness Economics » at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne for postgraduate students.

My objective for the Job Market is to find a position as Assistant Professor in a prestigious and stimulating environment where I can pursue my research activities as well as having good teaching opportunities. »


Gabor Katay

« I am currently the head of a small unit at the Banque de France producing fundamental research, as well as current analysis and policy notes on various issues related to potential output and growth. In parallel, I am completing my PhD studies at the Paris School of Economics under the supervision of Fabrizio Coricelli. Previously I worked for the Central Bank of Hungary and for the three final years spent there, I was leading an applied research team. I also spent eight months at the Research Department of the European Central Bank.

The common thread throughout my career has been identifying policy-relevant research priorities and conducting and coordinating applied research to inform evidence-based policy decisions. Accordingly, my research agenda has always been driven by actual economic or monetary policy concerns. I have been carrying out research in various fields of economics. In particular, I analyzed Hungarian firms’ investment decisions to investigate the interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission in a small open economy such as Hungary. I analyzed the determinants of total factor productivity with the aim of better understanding why the catch-up process has slowed down in Hungary since the early 2000s. I studied various aspects of wage determination, rigidities and wage differentials; and I have undertaken several research projects in the area of income taxation, social transfers and labour supply.

My Job Market paper focuses on the foreign currency borrowing strategy of firms. Several previous studies point out that in many Central and Eastern European countries, foreign currency borrowing rose significantly before the crisis and has become a major challenge for firms, households and for fiscal and monetary policy. To evaluate the risks associated with excessive foreign currency indebtedness, the paper investigates firms’ willingness to match the currency composition of their assets and liabilities and their incentives to deviate from perfect matching. »


Pauline Rossi

« In 2010, I joined the APE Master Program at the Paris School of Economics. I carried on with a PhD supervised by Sylvie Lambert and funded by CREST. I am currently a Junior Researcher at PSE.

My main fields of research are development economics and household economics. My approach combines microeconomic theory, microeconometric methods and insights from other disciplines (sociology, anthropology, demography and medicine).
My research project deals with strategic interactions between members of non-nuclear families. So far, the economic literature has focused on nuclear families, although this is just one living arrangement among others, which does not prevail in most developing countries, and tends to lose momentum in developed countries. As a first step in this project, my PhD dissertation focuses on strategic motives for fertility in African families.

My Job Market paper proposes a non-cooperative framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous unions. I investigate if and how the fertility behavior of one wife impacts the choices of the other wives. In Senegal, where my data come from, children turn out to be strategic complements. One wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by another wife, because her share in husband’s resources depends on her relative number of children. As far as I know, this is the first quantitative evidence that women in polygamous unions compete for more children. This result has strong implications for reproductive health policies in West Africa, where polygamy affects one third to one half of married women. It suggests that the sustained high level of fertility does not merely reflect women’s lack of control over births, as is often argued. It also reflects their incentives to have many children.

My current research agenda deals with situations in which men and women have children with more than one partner, expanding the analysis to developed countries and to decisions related to allocation of resources, investment in children and wealth transmission.

In 2010, I had the opportunity to gain strong international experience by working for three years in the financial sector in Chile and then in Mexico.

On the Job Market, I would like to find an Assistant Professor position in a leading academic institution. »