Grants

The COVID-19 emergence has led to a pandemic with over 6.9 million estimated deaths worldwide [1]. The epidemic management in Europe including France has allowed reducing the expected burden of disease. This was achieved in particular by a combination of initial reduction of transmission via containment policies of variable stringency and, one year later, strongly incentivised high uptake of Covid-19 vaccines among the adult population, using vaccines with high and well-persisting effectiveness against severe forms of the disease. This period was marked by scientific, societal and political debate about the effectiveness, safety, feasibility, legitimacy, parsimony and fairness of a variety of preventive countermeasures (PCMs) and related policies. This illustrated the challenges to control emerging infectious diseases while maintaining trust among and between stakeholders and limiting social inequalities. While it can be argued that rapid biomedical innovation combined with strong incentives will successfully control future emerging infectious disease events, others question the high societal costs of this approach, in particular at the expenses of societal trust and equity.
A considerable body of social sciences and public health evidence has described the need to foster individuals’ confidence in decisions and actions, and to address social inequalities during epidemic response, and that preference-based recommendation, organisation at the local level including healthcare workers (HCWs) can help achieving these requirements. However, less is known about how this evidence can be operationalised and translated into public health practice during epidemic situations and, to achieve this, methodological frames are needed.

The ACME project aims to contribute to the development and implementation of effective, acceptable and accessible PCMs, including vaccination, specifically for use during epidemics of (re-)emerging infectious diseases in France. The vision is to identify and prepare, during epidemic preparedness activities, confidence-building and inclusive strategies and programmes. The ACME project responds to the PEPR frame by constructing a multidisciplinary research consortium of academic institutions in France who will use social sciences and public health methods to prepare for future emerging infectious disease epidemics. Our project corresponds to the Axis 2 (Knowledge, expertise, communication), as it aims at a better understanding of key factors that impact the acceptance and the physical and psychological accessibility of various PCMs in epidemic situations, and will recommend approaches for the translation of this evidence into public health action. Although programme development and implementation are member state competencies, PCM recommendations can be expected to be increasingly guided by European supranational entities, a dimension that will be taken into account in the ACME project through involvement of European stakeholders in specific steps.
The general objectives of the ACME project are to:
1.    Assess determinants, facilitators and barriers of uptake/adherence, confidence and social equity regarding PCMs in epidemic situations in France, and identify approaches to monitor these factors for epidemic preparedness that should be implemented in non-epidemic periods (WP1).
2.    Develop potential scenarios of epidemic diseases and relevant PCMs, and evaluate preferences around corresponding strategies and programmes among the general population, HCWs and other relevant subgroups (WP2).
3.    Prepare interventional research on confidence-building and inclusive PCM programmes in epidemic situations, by identifying experiences reported in France and elsewhere (case studies) and evaluate their transferability to an epidemic context in France (WP3).
4.    Develop recommendations and roadmaps towards strategies and programmes that assure acceptability and accessibility of PCMs during epidemic situations in France and Europe, elaborate pre-protocols (blueprints) for rapid implementation of interventional research in future emergencies, and prepare their transfer and implementation into research and public health action for epidemic preparedness (WP4).
 

The IRN E3E is an international network comprising 7 partners across three countries (France, the United States, and Italy), coordinated by Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE, AMU & CNRS). It is designed as an initiative to consolidate and strengthen a team of researchers from three disciplines (economics, ecology, and mathematics), some of whom have collaborated for over 20 years. Their most recent shared research focus—which is also at the heart of this IRN E3E—is the development of conceptual and operational frameworks for controlling emerging and re-emerging epidemics.

The IRN E3E considers both the ecological and biological aspects as well as the economic dimensions of epidemic crises. It stands out due to its original mathematical foundations (accounting not only for individual economic behaviors within large, heterogeneous populations but also for strategic interactions between individuals from different socioeconomic sectors, as well as between individuals and public authorities). Additionally, it features an ambitious operationalization initiative for public policy, leveraging the most advanced statistical techniques and data science methods.

The roles played by migration and family formation for economic growth have been well studied by economists. Yet these aspects have tended to be examined separately, without considering the interaction between family formation and migration. This project seeks to understand the extent of this interaction and how it shaped economic development in Western Europe. To address this question we intend to build and explore a new dataset combining data from online genealogical websites (Geni and Geneanet) with other sources, notably censuses. We aim at answering three questions: (Q1) How does family members' decision to migrate in search of better economic opportunities depend on the stage of family formation? (Q2) How were these decisions shaped by the major economic and social transformations that Europe experienced since the mid-17th century? (Q3) How did family formation and migration decisions contribute to economic growth in Western Europe? The first stage in the project will tackle an ambitious collection of data to build (and de-bias) our novel dataset. The latter will allow us to follow around 700 million Europeans over the period 1640 to 1940, providing rich information from their birth to their death that will identify both family dynamics and migration patterns. The data will first be used to analyze how fertility and migration decisions shaped each other, with a particular focus on the economic returns to migration and the implications for social mobility. The project will also consider the gender dimension of these questions, as gender norms are both an important determinant of family outcomes and a result of population dynamics and location choices. Results from these individual-level analyses will allow us to answer Q1 and Q2. We will then use structural estimations to understand how family migration affects long-run economic growth both at the local and aggregate levels, in order to answer our third research question, Q3.

Economic inequalities rise and are accentuated by the Covid19 crisis in the Eurozone. We assume that financial and banking fragmentation implies different financing and income opportunities between countries, households and firms and thus fuels this dynamic. Our purpose is to assess the redistributive effects of financial markets and the banking sector considering income and wealth dispersion in the Eurozone. We first focus on the impact of banking intermediation on inequalities, via the distortions in the access to credit that the fragmentation induces. We therefore question the optimal ECB strategy for a more inclusive growth. We then study the main determinants of a virtuous circle between market financing and the reduction of inequalities. Our aim is to show that full regional financial and banking integration can contribute to a fairer Europe.

FISCAID proposes to use Uganda as an empirical case study to provide an in-depth analysis of the various mechanisms through which foreign assistance affects the fiscal behavior of the recipient country, focusing on public domestic expenditure and revenues at the national and sub-national levels as well as to revisit the macro-micro paradox of aid effectiveness. To this aim, we will mobilize administrative data from the Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development with empirical (econometrical) analyses addressing the following questions: i) to what extent aid is fungible and affects the fiscal behavior of the recipient government in a context of aid fragmentation and decentralization? ii) do those fiscal effects affect aid effectiveness and more generally development?

The project aims at developing and implementing new methods for appraising inequalities in human condition when those inequalities are multidimensional and/or ordinal. An important aspects of those considered inequalities concerns the opportunity to succeed. The project will contribute to these issues from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. On the theoretical side, we aim at enlarging to the multidimensional setting the ordinal notion of equalization underlying the Hammond principle of transfer and to examine, within that very same multidimensional setting, how can one combines aversion to correlation between variables and the concern for equalizing each of those variables in isolation. The objective of this research is to provide the policy analyst with easily usable criteria that enables the comparisons of alternatives states of affairs based on those considerations. The research will also identify plausible indicators of the "size of the cake" in an ordinal context which could serve as the analogue to the mean used for this purpose in a cardinal framework. As for opportunities, the aim will be again to complete the existing methods for identifying improvement and equalization of chances of success. We will also try to explain why the widespread aversion to inequality of opportunities does not translate - in the policy sphere - to a heavier taxation on inheritance and gains from loteries and gambles. On the empirical front, the research will perform an exhaustive appraisal of the relative performance of India and Europe (notably France) in reducing inequalities of opportunities between social groups formed on the basis of caste (in India) and country of birth (in Europe). The research will also apply robust methodologies for appraising the relative performance of private and public schools in providing to their pupils cognitive skills in a way that takes into account the differing social backgrounds of those pupils. The research will also examine, in China, the link between elitism and equality of opportunities to access university.

The Sea Water Air Conditioning (SWAC) technology, using deep-sea cold water, remains widely underutilized worldwide due to its limited understanding and requiring substantial investments. However, it efficiently air conditions existing buildings and districts and reduces consumption, power demand, and CO2 emissions by a factor of ten. In the context of climate change and successive heatwaves, the demand for active cooling equipment in buildings is expected to surge beyond the predictions made by the International Energy Agency in its 2018 'Future of Cooling' report.
This project proposes a multidisciplinary approach to identify and overcome any barriers that may hinder or limit the adoption of deep-sea water air conditioning (SWAC) technology, with the following operational objectives:
•    Identify and anticipate environmental, social, and societal barriers and obstacles.
•    Study the potential industrial and agricultural valorization of seawater discharges from the SWAC process.
•    Explore opportunities for utilizing the resource for cold/electricity co-generation.
•    Define integration strategies for these technologies in more sustainable buildings and districts.
•    Carry out multifactorial optimization, taking into account all relevant issues.
The project will provide new knowledge and tools for designing future SWAC installations and will highlight improvements for existing SWAC facilities. Through a multidisciplinary approach, it will enable the anticipation of potential barriers to the implementation of SWAC technology in all regions with cold water near the coasts. It will provide answers to energy, environmental, societal, and economic issues expected by designers and decision-makers. The MAEVA project will thus promote SWAC as a sustainable and resilient air conditioning technology."
 

Prosocial behavior is driven, not only by formal incentives, but also by image concerns, both self- and social image. While there is a growing literature on the consequences of image concerns on ethical behavior, the interactions between self-and social-image have not been studied yet. In SOSELF, we propose a comprehensive approach to fill this gap. Our project will use a combination of theory, laboratory experiments and empirical methods relying on an interdisciplinary team. We will explore how social and self-image are tied together by a principle of coherence and how their interactions drive behavioral responses to the environment. Building on these results, we will study the optimal design of one of the main interventions used to promote prosocial behavior: moral reminders. SOSELF can inform policy in a wide range of domains, from fighting the circulation of fake news to fighting against corruption. We will in particular focus on how behavioral interventions modify firm culture

Digitalization is the sociotechnical phenomenon of adopting information and communication technologies. Beyond wages and employment, this can have important effects on non-pecuniary (NP) working conditions, job satisfaction and wellbeing at work. Our objective is to understand how digitalization affects these dimensions of work, as well as how it affects the way individuals tradeoff wages and NP work conditions. The nature of social distancing during the COVID pandemic and the reliance of telecommuting on digital technologies have pushed these issues into the limelight. Therefore, we will also study the effects of digitalization in the context of the pandemic.

We ask whether and how digitalization impacts various dimensions of working conditions – hours, flexibility, mobility, physical effort, autonomy, team work, etc. – and thus job satisfaction and occupational choices. Taking into account non-pecuniary aspects of job quality is important because both wages and NP work conditions are considered by workers deciding on labor supply – and by employers deciding on labor demand – and there is reason to believe that they have not evolved in lockstep. One of the goals of project WRKCOV19 is to deepen our understanding of how new digital technologies (DTs) affect the joint evolution of wage and working conditions. The importance of this issue has recently been magnified by the COVID-19 crisis, as many employers and workers have dramatically increased their use of DTs in order to promote remote work and limit human contact in the workplace. Little is known about the impact of this radical re-organization on working conditions and wellbeing at work. And while vaccination campaigns will gradually remove many such barriers, much of the working conditions landscape will not return to the status quo ante.