Two ERC Synergy Grants awarded to PSE

The European Research Council (ERC) has just released the list of the 37 research groups awarded with a « ERC Synergy Grant 2019 ». This highly competitive process allows Horizon 2020 - the EU’s research and innovation programme - to finance 6-year-projects that gather “two to four top researchers who bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources [...] to tackle some of the most complex research problems”. Worth in total €363 million, these grants have been awarded to projects related to a wide variety of scientific fields and disciplines. This year, out of the 3 projects that have been selected in social sciences, two involves PSE researchers : one in association with PSE, the other coordinated by PSE.

DINA Project – Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts

Principal investigators: Thomas Piketty (PSE ; scientific advisor), Brian Nolan (University of Oxford), Emmanuel Saez (University of California).

Institutionnal framing: The Paris School of Economics will coordinate this project led by the World Inequality Lab (WIL). Thomas Piketty is the scientific advisor, with support from Facundo Alvaredo (PSE/EHESS) and Lucas Chancel (WIL/PSE). The OECD is associated to this project (proposal) as well, though the implication of Peter van de Ven. This project emphasizes on the recruitment of junior research fellows and will enable Gabriel Zucman, professor at the university of California, to be a visiting professor at PSE for a year.

Summary : This project aims at implementing a renovated approach to the measurement of income and wealth inequality consistent with macro aggregates, i.e macroeconomic national accounts. It should help the researchers to rebuild the bridges between distributional data available from micro sources and national accounts aggregates in a systematic way.

This is the main goal pursued through DINA-Distributional National Accounts where the analysis of growth and inequality can be carried over in a coherent framework. This endeavour also involves the production of synthetic micro-files, providing information on income and wealth, which will also be made available online. Those micro-files focus on individual level data that are not necessarily the result of direct observation but come from estimations that reproduce the observed distribution of the underlying data, including the joint distribution of age, gender, numbers of dependent children, income and wealth between adult individuals.

The global aim is to release income and wealth synthetic DINA micro-files for all countries on an annual basis. Such data will certainly play a critical role in the public debate, and will be used as a resource for further analysis by various actors in civil society and in the academic, business and political communities.

GENDHI Project - Gender and Health Inequalities: from embodiment to health care cascade

Principal investigators: Nathalie Bajos (INSERM ; Senior Coordinator), Michelle Kelly-Irving (INSERM), Muriel Darmon (CNRS) and Pierre-Yves Geoffard (PSE).

Institutionnal framing: Coordinated by INSERM. PSE is a partner of the project and will recruit, notanly, a team of young researchers.

Summary : In all European countries, social inequalities in health remain pervasive. Much research has identified a number of social stratifiers of health while others have specified the role of the health care system in contributing to the evolution of health inequalities. However, gender, as a social relation of power between men and women, is rarely considered as a key determinant of health inequalities, and when it is, theoretical frameworks are rarely relevant. Furthermore, while social science studies generally ignore biological processes, sex differences in biomedical research are often interpreted as biologically irreducible.

The objective of this project is to document and explain how gender intersects with other social hierarchies (social class and race/ethnicity) to produce social inequalities in health from early childhood to late adulthood. Adopting a life course perspective, the researchers will examine two complementary research questions: firstly, “gendered embodied health” or how (un)healthy bodies are socially constructed; and secondly “gendered health care cascade” or how health-seeking behaviours and patterns of care are shaped by gender. Within this framework, the team will focus on hypertension and myocardial infarction, depression, Alzheimer’s disease and colorectal cancer.

The approach is resolutely multidisciplinary, associating social sciences and epidemiology, in close collaboration with clinicians. The researchers will develop triangulation analysis based on secondary quantitative analysis of six large cross-sectional and cohort survey including biological markers on one hand, and family monographies, interviews with youth, patients and health professionals and ethnographic observations of medical visits on the other hand.