The project will study the poorly documented relationship between geographic and social mobility and their consequences on spatial inequalities. In particular, it will analyze the sources of spatial sorting as well as the role of transportation infrastructure on geographic and social mobility, for two countries with different spatial and political organizations, France and the United States, and for two contrasting periods, the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century. The research team will adopt a multidisciplinary approach and will rely on rich, localized and original historical data, such as information on the evolution of travel speeds. In particular, the project will focus on the role of transportation infrastructure development on local economic and demographic growth, the relocation of individuals and families across space, and access to opportunities (education and work).

In 2015, the number of asylum seekers in the European Union increased by 85% compared to the previous year. Following this inflow, the prospects for the integration or assimilation of these immigrants dominated the news’ headlines. Assimilation embodies many dimensions, but two of them are key, geographical settling and labor market outcomes (economic assimilation). Studying them simultaneously might provide useful lessons on which policies should be adopted in response to the current refugee flows. Our project investigates how these dimensions relate at both the macro and micro level. At the macro level, the efficiency of public policies is limited by the lack of knowledge of local segregation patterns and how they affect labor market outcomes. To address this gap, we will document how the assimilation varied across cities in France from 1968 to 2012 when the non-European immigration rised dramatically. We will estimate various indicators of labor market and residential assimilation and explore how they interact. We hypothesize that many differences in segregation patterns across cities mirror differences in public housing quality and quantity. Public housing is likely to grow in the coming years, as many countries will tackle the housing of refugees through substantial constructions. We will investigate whether some characteristics of public housing can be detrimental to assimilation. In addition, we will examine how contemporary public housing policies such as the SRU Laws (loi relative à la solidarité et au renouvellement urbain, 2000 & 2013) have affected segregation levels. At the micro level, individual panel data will be used to capture the relationship between residential trajectories and economic progress in the assimilation process. We will address the following questions: are immigrants and refugees moving into more ethnically and socio-economically mixed neighborhoods as they climb the economic ladder? Or does segregation persists by origin groups, even when occupational mobility occurs, as the “place stratification” perspective would predict? Finally, because the descendants of immigrants can be identified in the data, we will search for the longer-term implications of these dynamics. As refugees account for a large share of the current immigration, should we expect their assimilation to differ from the one of economic migrants? Differences might reflect diversity in average skills between refugees and economic migrants or the fact that refugees cannot generally plan or prepare the migration decision. On the other hand, as return migration is not an option for them in contrast to economic migrants, their longer expected duration of stay might encourage learning country specific skills, with favorable consequences on assimilation. However, in practice, the distinction between economic migrants and refugees may be not so categorical. In case of war the economy of a country collapses and the migration decision is often based on mixed considerations such as economic gains and escaping physical threats. When migration motives are “mixed”, whether large differences between types of migrants should be observed is theoretically unclear. We will assess empirically these issues. A significant part of our project exploits of a large body of individual level data which were previously not accessible because of confidentiality issues. Access is permitted by a secure distance access system (French acronym CASD) organized by the French statistical institute. The data currently available for France is quite unique in international terms because it is comprehensive, of very high quality, and covers a long period of time. For this reason, our analysis of the French case can cover several dimensions that have not been studied previously.

For individuals navigating in a hazardous environment, for companies competing in complex markets, good decisions are essential to survival. Assessing one’s own decisions, an ability called metacognition, might help improving these decisions. As such, metacognition is becoming an important topic in cognitive sciences and neurosciences of decision-making. Our proposal is aimed at better understanding the influence of this metacognitive ability on our behaviour. Basic studies in cognitive sciences and neurosciences have aimed at quantifying the ability of agents to make good metacognitive judgments, or at determining the neural mechanisms underlying such judgments. Critically however, in most current approaches, metacognitive judgments seem to be commentaries on behaviour, without real impact. Here, we want to clarify the ways in which metacognition might have a direct impact on the behaviour of an individual, using an experimental and computational approach. We will consider several potential links between metacognition and behaviour, and we will conduct series of behavioural experiments to test these links empirically. Our experimental studies are based on visual psychophysics, a discipline which currently serves as a ground to develop neurobiological and computational models of decision-making. We will complement our empirical investigations with eyetracking recordings, focusing on particular on pupil size which has been linked to confidence in recent work. We will adopt in parallel a modelling approach to better motivate and interpret our empirical investigations. Our project involves two lines of research. On the one hand, we will investigate the influence of metacognition on the behaviour of an agent performing a task in isolation. For instance, we will test the hypotheses that confidence might act as a value signal during task selection, and as a priority signal during task planning. On the other hand, we will investigate the impact of metacognitive abilities and judgments on the behaviour of an agent who receives information from the environment and from other agents. For instance, we will assess how overconfidence (which is a major issue for instance in behavioural finance) impacts on behavioural adjustment to external information. We will study the influence of metacognition in situations in which agents cooperate or compete with each other. In sum, the proposed project takes a basic science approach, in the field of behavioural sciences. We wish to study the ability of human observers to assess their own cognitive processes, an ability called metacognition. We will broaden the spectrum of research questions in this domain, in order to provide new insights about metacognition and how it impacts on behaviour. We anticipate that acknowledging the instrumental role of confidence will improve our models of decision-making, and will enrich the emerging dialogue between behavioural psychologists and economists.

Uncertainty plays a crucial role in strategic conflicts, either in the form of uncertainty of the environment or uncertainty in strategy choices. In many real world conflicts, it is not possible to model the uncertainty by probabilistic models; instead, agents face what is called Knightian uncertainty or (model) ambiguity: the probability distribution of outcomes is not exactly known to the actors. In social conflicts, we frequently have environmental variables as past experience, preplay communication, or cultural norms that influence the equilibrium outcome but are not directly part of the modeled payo ffs. It is thus important to incorporate such model uncertainty or ambiguity into the analysis of strategic conflicts. The project aims to develop a general theory of such (objective) ambiguity in strategic interactions. Two main themes will be developed. First, in strategic conflicts it is frequently important to create uncertainty as opponents would exploit perfect information about one's behavior to one's own detriment. Traditionally, such strategic uncertainty has been modeled by probabilistic devices with known probabilities, as dices or roulette wheels. In real interactions, a much wider variety of strategic uncertainty is available to players. This is certainly reflected and intuitively felt in the policy literature on negotiations and is known to bargainers alike.We take up recent advances in decision theory that allow to model such uncertainty and study the resulting changes in equilibrium predictions for game theory. Second, the environment might itself be ambiguous. Players might not have sufficient probabilistic information over the game played, the type of the opponents etc as is traditionally assumed. In real environment,information is often scarce and does not allow probabilistic assessments. How does this uncertainty a ect the strategies played at equilibrium? Is it possible to parametrize the set of equilibria by the degree of ambiguity of the environment? The aim of the current project is to develop the whole theory of such situations, including its decision theoretic and epistemological foundations, the extensive form theory, and applications to speci c strategic conflicts that are important from an economic point of view. For instance, we intend to study the consequences of our theory for communication games or bargaining situations between economic parties. We will also accompany our studies by experiments to test our predictions in the laboratory.

The research project focuses on the challenges individuals face when developing effective information search strategies. The project builds upon experimental findings obtained in an experimental paradigm simulating a recruitment situation. Most participants adopt an intuitive but less informative information search strategy. This type of inefficient information search behavior constitutes a cognitive bias that doesn't seem to have been identified previously and could have a broader impact on information search behaviors. The goal is to thoroughly investigate this cognitive bias using theoretical modeling and behavioral experiments and to explore potential remedies. The working hypothesis is that individuals facing a complex information search problem may first generate a prototype of their final decision, which serves as a starting point for information search. In particular, they will specifically seek information that reduces uncertainty about this prototype. Once information collection is complete, they will make their actual selection decision based on the collected information.