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Job Market 2015-2016 at PSE: who are Olivia Bertelli, Yannick Dupraz and Ricardo Estrada?

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.

Olivia Bertelli

« In 2011, my Master’s supervisor at the University of Florence, Giorgia Giovannetti, pushed me to go to PSE - at a time I didn’t even know it existed, where I started my PhD under the supervision of Karen Macours about agricultural economics and constraints to technology adoption.

My Job Market paper is about household fertility decisions in poor rural Nigeria. By exploiting positive exogenous weather shocks together with household panel data, I find that abundant rainfall increases children’s survival. Households respond by decreasing their fertility, but not completely, leading to an imperfect adjustment. It’s only large households with more than three children that decrease their fertility. This matches the predictions of the theoretical framework, which shows that the magnitude of the fertility adjustment depends on the number of children alive at the moment of the shock. Thus, even when positive shocks occur, households get on average larger, as more children survive and parents only partially reduce their fertility. Consistent with such partial adjustment, household food security and children’s anthropometric measures get worse.

A core part of my research is based on extensive field work I have been conducting since 2013 in Uganda, working on a large scale Randomised Control Trial about the adoption of dairy technologies. Together with Luc Behaghel, Jérémie Gignoux and Karen Macours, I have actively participated in its implementation since the very beginning, from initial qualitative interviews and focus groups, to the design of the baseline questionnaire, the actual data collection and the implementation of public lotteries for assigning the intervention. The main research aim is to test the impact of a training devoted to teaching dairy farmers technologies for increasing milk production. In addition, I investigate the role of farmers’ social networks in diffusing the adoption of technologies within their village, by randomizing the type of incentives they receive. I also explore whether keeping livestock is a profitable investment or if it’s just a substitute for lack of saving services.

In 2015 I devoted a lot of time to the presentation of my work in international academic conferences, such as the CSAE in Oxford and the RES in Manchester, as well as workshops and summer schools all over Europe. I am currently spending the last year of my PhD at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) in Stockholm as part of the PODER network.

My objective for the Job Market is to find a position as Professor or Junior Researcher in a high-level institution with an international profile. I would like to pursue field-work research activities while taking up more responsibilities in teaching, ideally development economics classes. »

Yannick Dupraz

« I was originally trained as a historian at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Because I was interested in economic history, I spent a year at the London School of Economics, where I discovered other fields of economics and quantitative analysis. I then did a Master’s degree in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where I met my supervisor, Denis Cogneau, who, like me, was convinced that studying the long term was important to understand economic development. I am spending my last PhD year visiting the Aix-Marseille School of Economics.

One of my main research themes is how and when institutions and policies inherited from the past matter for economic development today. My Job Market paper studies the comparative legacies of British and French colonization in education. In order to avoid problems of selection, I look at a natural experiment: after WWI, the German colony of Kamerun was divided between the British and the French. I find that differences favoring the British side that emerged during the interwar period were very quickly smoothed away in the very late colonial period and after independence, when investments in education increased massively on the French-speaking side. It shows that Africa is not necessarily a prisoner of its colonial past. Today, the main legacies of this history are cultural: language, of course, but also a higher percentage of Christians in English-speaking Cameroon (in British colonies, education was mainly provided by religious missions).

The most enriching part of my PhD research was probably a field trip in Cameroon to collect quantitative and qualitative data. I met Cameroonian historian Jacob Tatsitsa, with whom I learnt a lot about Cameroon and about historical methods.

On the Job Market, I hope to find an academic position in Europe or the United States in order to continue doing research in a stimulating research environment. »

Ricardo Estrada

« I joined PSE as a second year masters student of the PPD program in 2009, just in time to be a proud member of the first graduating cohort of this program. The following year, I enrolled in the doctoral program under the supervision of Marc Gurgand and Jérémie Gignoux.

I was very lucky that François Bourguignon had obtained access to data from Comipems, the centralized admission system to public high schools in Mexico City – the city where I was born - shortly before I started my thesis. Both for the quality of data and the institutional design, Comipems offers a fascinating setting for researchers interested in questions related to school quality, school choice and stratification. In my thesis, I study – with Jérémie Gignoux – the causal effect of elite schools on students’ expected wages and – in solo work – the effects of the increasing demand over elite schools on school stratification.

Not all my work relates to Comipems. In my Job Market paper, I take advantage of a unique setting that allows me to compare the quality (value-added to student achievement) of the teachers hired in a discretionary process led by the teachers’ union in Mexico with those hired on the basis of a screening rule. Because of data limitations, there is little empirical research on how organization conduct hiring and the potential trade-off between recruiting using rules that are second-best predictors of quality but hard to manipulate, or relying on the choices of an agent that can potentially abuse discretion. My results show that the teachers’ union selects applicants of a considerably lower quality than those selected using a standardized test, despite the fact that the test has no power to predict teacher quality. My results indicate that the teachers selected through the discretionary process are from the bottom of the distribution of applicant quality. Findings are consistent with the concerns about rent extraction that motivated the reform I evaluate.

For the Job Market, I hope to find an academic position in an environment as stimulating as the Paris School of Economics. I would like an Assistant Professor position. »