AFSE PhD Awards

The AFSE is pleased to announce the laureates of the 2025 PhD Thesis Awards:

AFSE Best PhD Thesis Award

The 2025 AFSE PhD Prize has been awarded to Anaïs Fabre for her dissertation entitled Essays on Higher Education Access and Econometrics. Her research was conducted at the Toulouse School of Economics under the supervision of Thierry Magnac and Olivier de Groote, and was completed in June 2024.

Anaïs FABRE

Anaïs research work is related to labor economics and econometrics, with a particular focus on inequalities in access to higher education. She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In October 2025, Anais will join LMU Munich as an Assistant Professor of Economics.     

Anais' PhD Dissertation Summary

Anaïs’ PhD Dissertation aims both at broadening our understanding of the determinants of inequalities in access to higher education, and at expanding and deepening our understanding of available econometric tools. The Dissertation is structured in 4 chapters. Chapter 1 ‘The Geography of Higher Education and Spatial Inequalities’ uses rich administrative data to document that the spatial distribution of higher education options is highly uneven in France, while students’ demand for programs is elastic to their geographic proximity. Leveraging policy changes and a dynamic model linking equilibrium sorting on the higher education market and location choices of entry-level workers, the chapter shows that mitigating barriers to mobility would decrease regional gaps in educational attainment but could generate a long-lasting brain drain toward higher education hubs. Chapter 2, ‘Opportunity Costs of Time and the Design of College Admission Mechanisms’, co-authored with Olivier De Groote, Margaux Luflade and Arnaud Maurel, documents how the design of college admission platforms impacts students’ enrollment outcomes. The chapter evaluates the welfare and distributional effects of implementing sequential assignment procedures to match students to programs, which redistribute seats left vacant in the presence of higher education institutions operating off-platform. Chapter 3, ‘Incomplete Information and the Complexity of Centralized College Application Processes’, studies information frictions in college admission procedures. Using data from the Chilean centralized admission mechanism, the chapter shows that the complexity of the application procedure negatively impacts students’ admission outcomes, with disproportionately adverse effects on disadvantaged students. Finally, Chapter 4, ‘Robustness of Two-Way Fixed Effects Estimators to Heterogeneous Treatment Effects’, deepens economists’ understanding of the widely used Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) estimator by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for this estimator to be robust to heterogeneous treatment effects.

Learn more about Anais Fabre and her work on her homepage.

2025 AFSE PhD Prize - Special mentions

The very high quality of the submitted theses also led the jury to award two special mentions to Ségal Le Guern Herry and Duncan Webb.

Ségal LE GUERN HERRY

Ségal’s PhD dissertation, entitled Essays on Behavioral Responses to Taxation, was completed at Sciences Po under the supervision of Gabriel Zucman and Jean-Marc Robin in June 2024.

Ségal was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley from August 2022 to March 2023. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics and a Senior Economist at the EU Tax Observatory.

His research primarily focuses on how households respond to taxation and the implications of these responses for tax progressivity and inequality. His work is highly relevant for anyone interested in wealth taxation and tax evasion.

Ségal's PhD Dissertation Summary

Ségal Le Guern Herry’s PhD dissertation brings new evidence to the debates on the desirability of higher taxes on the wealthy. Drawing on the increasing availability of detailed administrative data from several countries, the three chapters of his dissertation explore how taxpayers at the top of the income or wealth distribution adjust their investment strategies in response to changes in the tax environment.

The first chapter studies behavioral responses to wealth taxation using administrative data from France. In particular, Ségal shows that the 2017 abolition of the French wealth tax — and its replacement with a progressive tax on real estate — led French households to rebalance part of their real estate wealth toward financial assets. This response allows him to estimate the cross-elasticity between real estate and financial wealth, a key parameter for assessing whether it is desirable to tax real estate differently from other assets. The second chapter, coauthored with Jeanne Bomare, uses administrative data from the UK to analyze how tax evaders reacted to the introduction of cross-country information sharing on financial assets. The authors show that offshore investors exploited a loophole in the information exchange system, shifting investments into UK properties via tax havens to keep their wealth hidden. The third chapter, written with Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman, estimates the degree of substitution between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance using Norwegian administrative data. The findings suggest that when evasion is high, stricter tax enforcement can potentially raise more revenue than even large increases in nominal tax rates.

Learn more about Ségal Le Guern Herry and his work on his homepage.

Duncan WEBB

Duncan’s PhD dissertation, entitled Essays in Development Economics, was completed at the Paris School of Economics under the supervision of Karen Macours and Suanna Oh in June 2024.

Duncan is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and will join NovaSBE as an Assistant Professor in 2025. He spent the academic year 2022-2023 as a visiting scholar at MIT, and as a J-PAL Invited Researcher.

Duncan's main field of research is development economics, and he uses tools and insights from behavioral economics to focus on highly policy-relevant issues related to discrimination, social change, and human capital.

Duncan's PhD Dissertation Summary

Duncan’s PhD dissertation studies how social interactions have impacts on economic outcomes for marginalized groups in emerging countries, and how inequalities in human capital can propagate and be addressed. The dissertation is structured in 3 chapters. The first, Silence to Solidarity: Using Group Dynamics to Reduce Anti-Transgender Discrimination in India, studies how discrimination is affected by communication about a marginalized minority. The second, Menstrual Stigma, Hygiene, and Human Capital: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar, joint with Karen Macours and Julieta Vera Rueda, studies how menstrual stigma can be addressed by amplifying the voice of those who are willing to speak out, and how hygiene-focused programs can generate human capital improvements in low-income schools. Finally, the third chapter, Critical Periods in Cognitive and Socioemotional Development: Evidence from Weather Shocks in Indonesia, studies how the timing of shocks in early childhood can have long-lasting consequences on the development of an individual’s human capital.

Learn more about Duncan Webb and his work on his homepage.