I am an international academic researcher versatile in social sciences and statistics. I am also a member of many international scientific networks.
The core motivation and passion in my work, whether for research, teaching or consultations, arises from social and economic policy issues. My activities have been performed all over the World, including consulting work for many national and international organizations. They yielded decisive enhancement of social policies in several countries by improving their efficiency and reducing their costs.
My topics of study are varied and multidisciplinary, with high level publications in: applied development economics, mathematics and theoretical econometrics, survey techniques and economic theory.
These topics are generally originated from unresolved policy questions and lead to diverse practical applications. In that sense, they reflect my activities as an applied development economist. As a consequence, they often yielded academic papers in the applied economics literature, notably in the fields of poverty analysis.
Another important field of application of these interests is in teaching and in the organization of academic events.
A crucial dimension of interventions for improving policies and household situations is the availability of relevant data. I contribute to this through innovative data collection methods, mostly by designing household and individual surveys. One of my favorite contexts is that of developing economies.
I also construct sophisticated social and economic indicators, supported by economic theoretical foundations, but also by new statistical techniques. Some of these innovative indicators I designed allow for multidimensional welfare and poverty analyses, sometimes drawing on techniques of stochastic dominance.
A parallel dimension I am interested in is the development of new econometric methods to deal with the studied topics. As poverty and income distribution analyses are central, I found it natural to investigate econometric estimation methods that aim at describing some features of the conditional or unconditional distributions of living standard variables, for example quantile regressions or RIF regressions.
Statistical targeting issues are also relevant, and I developed methods in this field that produced massive improvement of the performance of social programs, both in terms of targeting and cost saving, applied to different countries such as Rwanda, Tunisia, Mauritius, The Gambia and Seychelles.
Related to data collection and indicator construction, I also develop statistical methods robust to the presence of some measurement errors, and panel data techniques that fit better the time and discreteness nature of the collected information, and its causality.
It is not enough to have good data, good statistics and good policy aims. Some kind of theoretical framework must be proposed that support the analyses in all their stages. In particular, I investigate theoretical models of complex welfare and poverty situations, as they are necessary to guide efficient and relevant social policies.
Moreover, individuals respond to their situations, to the shocks they face and to policies, even in situations of missing or imperfect markets, and of complex social interactions. Accordingly, I study theoretical individual decision models, in all relevant domains: labor and production, consumption, health and nutrition, fertility and family issues, social interactions, political engagement, energy and environmental choices, violent conflict…
Finally, I explore theoretical models at more aggregate society levels in order to grasp the logics of political economy, violent conflicts and other network interactions in society.