Biography

After graduating from Sciences-Po Paris and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 2006, I became a Ph.D. student in the newly-born Paris School of Economics (PSE) under the supervision of Jean-Olivier Hairault. At the same time, I was working as a teaching assistant in Macroeconomics at Université Paris 2.

My research interests lie in a broad spectrum within applied economics, ranging from labour economics to behavioural economics, with a focus on retirement issues and economics of well-being.

My Ph.D. dissertation ‘Essays in empirical microeconomics on the retirement decision’, which I completed by summer 2011, is made up of four working papers. The first one examines the social security claiming decision of the unemployed in the United States, and links their early claiming behaviour to their need to finance consumption during a costly job search process.

The remainder of my Ph.D. thesis focuses on the subjective determinants of retirement. I was particularly interested in the transition ‘from dream to reality’, i.e. in the conditions leading workers to make their transition to retirement once they had expressed the wish to retire as soon as possible.

Jointly with Andrew E. Clark, I have worked on the value that workers assign to different kinds of jobs by comparing the well-being of the same individual when they are in work to when they are retired. More recently, we have been investigating the heterogeneity in individuals’ valuations of income, and the role of the marginal utility of income in predicting retirement.