Research
▸Gender Differences in Academia
Abstract: We document gender gaps in research productivity over the career cycle using administrative records on 93,304 published academics in French universities and research institutes, across all fields and cohorts born in 1940–1989, linked to their Web of Science publications (1965–2023). The gap has not narrowed across cohorts: women publish about 20% fewer papers per year than men in the 1940s and 1950s cohorts, and 25 to 27% fewer in the 1960s and 1970s cohorts. Over the career, the gap is U-shaped, widening from 23.5% at age 30 to 31% at age 42 before narrowing to about 25% by age 64; in the life sciences, it keeps widening and never recovers. We examine five mechanisms. Matching on early-career characteristics reduces the gap by up to half but leaves its U shape intact. Parenthood penalizes mothers and fathers similarly. Women's promotion odds are 50% lower than those of comparable men, especially early in the career, and women submit about 15% fewer national grant applications, with larger gaps in the life sciences. A triple-difference design shows that combining teaching and research penalizes women more than men, mainly in medicine. Different mechanisms dominate at different career stages and in different fields.
Cluster-Based Funding and the Gender Gap in Scientific Collaboration Networks: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment, with Nicolas Carayol and Pascale Roux Extended abstract available upon request. Funding: Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine Grant (AAPR2020-2019-8020710). PI: Prof. Pascale Roux
Abstract: Women's coauthorship networks are smaller, more locally clustered, and less likely to bridge disconnected parts of the scientific community than men's, a pattern often attributed to unequal access to the resources that support tie formation. Testing this resource-constraint hypothesis is difficult because funding under individually targeted grant schemes is itself shaped by gendered self-selection into competitive environments. We exploit the staggered rollout of the Laboratoires d'Excellence (LabEx) program, a large French cluster-based funding scheme awarded to research communities rather than individuals, to estimate the effect of collectively relaxing resource constraints on gendered network formation. Using a regression-based staggered difference-in-differences estimator on three-year rolling coauthorship networks for 4,224 researchers, and conditioning on the evaluation grades assigned by the selection committee, we find that LabEx funding expands coauthorship networks for both genders, but substantially more for women, and through different channels: men's modest gains are concentrated within the funded cluster, while women's larger gains occur almost entirely outside it, including internationally. Among the most productive researchers, this asymmetry sharpens: treated women's networks expand roughly three times as much as in the full sample, while equally productive treated men show no outward expansion at all. Both genders gain funded grants after treatment; in the full sample only men increase their applications, while among top producers women's applications rise to a comparable level, though imprecisely estimated. These findings identify constrained network formation as a mechanism linking funding disadvantage to broader gender gaps in academic careers, and show that collective, cluster-based funding instruments can partially offset it.
Narrow Within, Broad Beyond: Gender, Research Positioning, and Productivity in French Mathematics, single-authored Working paper, draft available upon request.
Abstract: Women remain strongly under-represented in mathematics, and their lower publication output is often seen as the core of the gender gap. Using a panel of 3,950 France-based mathematicians over 1991–2023, linking administrative career records to Web of Science and zbMATH data, I show that the gap is one of volume rather than quality: women's JIF-weighted output is about 17% lower than men's, but citations per paper and mean journal impact are similar. I then separate three dimensions of research positioning: subfield choice, specialization within mathematics (MSC2020 codes), and cross-disciplinary reach (the diversity of Web of Science subjects in references and citations). Women sort into applied subfields and away from the high-prestige theoretical core from career entry, are slightly more specialized within mathematics, and draw on and reach a broader range of disciplines, especially the life and medical sciences. Both forms of breadth predict higher subsequent output, but they act in opposite directions on the gender gap: accounting for them widens the within-subfield gap from 25% to 27%. Women's research agendas mitigate rather than explain the productivity gap. Heterogeneity across the initial productivity distribution points to strategic adaptation to career constraints rather than stable preference differences.
Constraint or Choice? Gender, Career Trajectories, and Research Agendas of French Mathematics PhDs, new project with Chiara Sabadin (PI: Amal Boughnim) Funding application under review: Women and Science Chair, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL.
Summary: A survey-based and qualitative project following mathematics PhD graduates trained in France. We study what determines whether they pursue academic, teaching, or industry careers, and, for those who remain in academia, what drives their choice of research agenda: preferences, incentives, or career constraints, and how these differ by gender. The project extends “Narrow Within, Broad Beyond” from what mathematicians work on to why.
▸Conflict of Interest in Biomedical Research
Summary: In this paper, we leverage a rich dataset combining public disclosures of companies' financial ties to academics, administrative data, firm data, and bibliometric data to assess the prevalence and determinants of conflict-of-interest disclosure, using state-of-the-art machine learning and AI techniques.
▸ Workshop Organization
Since 2023, I have co-organized the annual Workshop on the Economics of Science and Innovation (EoSI), bringing together PhD students and young researchers to present and discuss work in the economics of science, innovation, and knowledge production. The workshop began as a small pilot edition in 2023 with 4 invited researchers, before growing into a fully competitive workshop: both the 2024 and 2026 editions welcomed around 15 high-quality presenters from various European research institutions.
The workshop has featured renowned keynote speakers in the economics of science and innovation, including Cornelia Lawson (University of Manchester), Michele Pezzoni (Université Côte d'Azur), Ina Ganguli (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Sotaro Shibayama (University of Tokyo).
More information, including past and upcoming editions, is available on the workshop website.