Biography

Sarolta Laczó is a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She earned her Ph.D. from the Toulouse School of Economics in October 2009 with a thesis on informal risk sharing. Her advisors were Thierry Magnac and Pierre Dubois.
Her general research interest is household behavior when markets are incomplete, contributing to the fields of Applied Microeconometrics, Development Economics, and Macroeconomics. Her research topics include Risk sharing, Incomplete markets, Dynamic contracts, and Risk theory.
Laczó's job market paper, Estimating Dynamic Contracts: Risk Sharing in Village Economies, extends the empirical literature on risk sharing with limited commitment by allowing for heterogeneity in preferences and in income risk. She finds that that the heterogeneous model can explain the consumption allocation significantly better, and it predicts consumption to respond more to idiosyncratic income shock. Since the estimation is done in a structural manner, the effects of social policies can be simulated.
In a theoretical contribution Riskiness, Risk Aversion and Risk Sharing, she establishes conditions under which enforcement constraints that guarantee perfect risk sharing are relaxed due to more risk or higher risk aversion. She points out that strong conditions are needed for the intuitive comparative statics results to hold.
During her year at the EUI, she studies how income decisions are affected by imperfect consumption insurance. She is also working on a project that looks at matching to share risk when commitment is limited.