Economics serving society

September 2019

How to identify the relevant research topics in order to best tackle a societal issue?

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Lorenzo Cassi*, Agénor Lahatte, Ismael Rafols, Pierre Sautier, Élisabeth de Turckheim

Assessing the contribution of research to address complex global problems or grand challenges - such as climate change, food security, poverty reduction, the risk of global pandemics - has become increasingly important in science policy as governments are under pressure to justify and legitimise their spending in research. Conventional bibliometric techniques have...

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Does lowering monetary policy rates increase risk-taking in the financial sector?

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Nuno Coimbra* and Hélène Rey

In the aftermath of the great financial crisis, the question of excessive risk-taking by banks and other financial intermediaries became very important in the minds of policy makers and academics alike. Understanding its causes and origins is essential in designing adequate regulations, since risk is also a fundamental and inherent aspect of the financial sector. One important concern is understanding whether monetary policy affects risk-taking in the financial sector and also...

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Access to homeownership for immigrants

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Laurent Gobillon* and Matthieu Solignac

The integration of migrants is a constant preoccupation for the European countries that have experienced migration flows within the Union and an influx of refugees. There is abundant economics literature about immigrants’ success in the labour market, as well as the effect of the arrival of foreign labour force on the success of natives (1), but access to homeownership, another marker of migrant integration, has been little studied so far. Homeownership can be a sign of...

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Supply chain formation and fragility

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Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub and Matthew Leduc*

Modern production is complex: For instance, building an airplane requires combining many indispensable types of components/engines, navigation systems, etc. In turn, these components are themselves complex, made up of many essential subcomponents, and so on. Thus, when the supply chain is disrupted and some goods cannot be sourced successfully, the ripple effects can destroy a great deal of value. Sourcing disruptions happen for a variety of reasons: a delivery...

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The allocation of ambiguity among heterogeneous investors

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Sujoy Mukerji, Han N. Ozsoylev and Jean-Marc Tallon*

The financial economics literature largely assumes that investors know the distribution of asset returns. In most real-world situations, however, decision-makers are uncertain about the data-generating process, a situation referred to as “ambiguity”. This can have important implications for portfolio choice, because investors may prefer portfolio allocations that are robust across the set of return distributions believed...


* Members of the Paris School of Economics