Prizes and distinctions : Youssef Souidi receives the Jean-Claude Eicher Thesis Award for the Development of Research in Education
Published on
On June 16, 2025, the Institut de recherche sur l’éducation (IREDU) awarded the 2025 Jean-Claude Eicher Prize for the Development of Research in Education.
Youssef Souidi, a graduate of the Public Policy and Development Master’s program (2017) and the PhD program (2022) at PSE, received the joint first prize for his thesis entitled “School assignment policies, school segregation, and student skills: evidence from the french school system.” Youssef Souidi is currently senior economist at the IPP (PSE-CREST).
His thesis focuses on school segregation and addresses three research questions:
- First, to what extent is it possible to act on between-school segregation in a residence-based school assignment system where parents have opt-out options?
- Second, how the availability of extracurricular courses affects the level of segregation within a school, between the different classes?
- Finally, to what extent enrolling in a more diverse school impacts students’ school experience, their academic skills, and their social skills?
To answer these questions, this thesis takes advantage of rich administrative datasets released by the statistical service of the French Ministry of Education. They are supplemented by historical data on catchment areas obtained from local authorities as well as student-level survey data, collected in a sample of schools. These datasets are exploited using econometric methods to identify the causal effects of natural experiments on outcomes of interest.