Discover the portrait of Benoit Schmutz-Bloch, associate professor at the Department of Economics at École Polytechnique, AMSE former member.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR CAREER TRAJECTORY SINCE YOUR TIME AT AMSE?
I joined GREQAM, which was not yet called AMSE, directly as a PhD student in 2007. I was officially supervised by Pierre Philippe Combes, but in fact, it was a trio with Bruno Decreuse and Alain Trannoy. My thesis was on immigrants of African origin and the housing market in France. Upon my arrival, we responded to a call for proposals from DARES on discrimination. We were a small team: the three professors, Morgane Laouenan, now in the CNRS in Paris, and myself.
I defended my thesis in 2011. Then I was a temporary teaching and research assistant (ATER) at the University of Paris-Sud (now Paris-Saclay) for Miren Lafourcade, with whom we responded to a call for projects from DARES and the Ministry for Urban Affairs on the evaluation of enterprise zone policies (‘Zones Franches Urbaines’). I received a one-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Îlede-France region to work on this with her. So, I worked at Paris-Sud and also spent some time at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST), where I’m currently based. Then, for personal reasons, I went to the United States, to Washington DC. During my first year in Washington, thanks to Bruno Decreuse, I met two professors, Jim Albrecht and Suzanne Vroman, whom he had known for a long time. They invited me to Georgetown University, which enabled me to have an office, meet people, and take part in seminars at the university.
Then I found a job in the Washington area as an assistant professor at Howard University, wellknown in the United States as the leading AfricanAmerican university. I taught there for 4 years.
In 2016, I decided to go back to France and went through a limited job market process. I applied for a few positions in Paris and was offered a position at the École Polytechnique.
In 2017, the Economics Department at École Polytechnique underwent significant changes, becoming part of CREST as the École nationale de la statistique et de l’administration économique (ENSAE) moved to the École Polytechnique campus. I came on board at that time, was an assistant professor for three years, and was appointed professor in 2020.
Since 2023, I have also held the Jean Marjoulet chair at the École Polytechnique. This three-year chair is awarded to a researcher regardless of discipline (whether in physics, computer science, or mathematics). I have also recently become responsible for a corporate chair in sustainable development sponsored by EDF: the DDX chair.
WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON CURRENTLY?
I started with a background in geography before transitioning to economics for my Master 2. I’ve always been interested in residential mobility issues. I worked on residential mobility behaviors related to the job search, collaborating with my co-author Modibo Sidibé.
I’ve also worked on social housing issues with Gregory Verdugo, who is a professor of economics at CY Cergy Paris Université, and on the links between municipal elections and social housing. I’m currently trying to build a project on the mechanisms for allocating social housing with Julien Combe, a colleague at CREST.
Finally, for six years and three days now, I’ve been working on the Yellow Vests movement. I’m part of a team with two other professors from the École Polytechnique and several former students. We published a descriptive article on the Yellow Vests in which we explored their digital presence using a large amount of data collected from social networks. This is the subject that currently takes up most of my time.
The big topic behind this work is the dynamics of social movements, in particular the life cycle of social movements: is it linked to its digital architecture? It is widely accepted that the social media generally contribute to the emergence of social movements by lowering coordination costs. We are looking at whether there is a downside: do social networks make social movements more likely to radicalise and disappear more quickly? This is something that has been documented by sociologists, particularly in the important book by Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2018). In the case of the Yellow Vests, street demonstrations quickly became quite violent, whereas the initial protests were fairly peaceful. There are lots of explanations for this: people may become frustrated, the police response may have an effect, etc. Yet, beyond all these factors, intuition tells us that movements are very heterogeneous and that some people are more inclined to adopt violent methods, but only if they realize they are numerous enough to do so. Social networks help reveal this information.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR TIME AT AMSE?
I’d done very little economics before, so for me it was an introduction to economics. There was this team of three teachers who supervised me: they were very complementary, we saw each other often, and we wrote papers together, which was really good.
Initially, I thought I would be doing more empirical work. In fact, when I met Bruno Decreuse and started working on job search models, I partly reoriented my research towards theory, and at GREQAM we had the opportunity to gradually modify our subject.
→ This article was issued in AMSE Newletter, Winter 2024.
