Antoine FEREY, winner of the 2025 Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award in Public Economics

On March 20th, the CESifo Research Network announced the laureate of the 2025 Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award at its 3-day Area Conference on Public Economics, that was held in Munich. The Department’s Antoine Ferey, Assistant Professor of Economics (tenure track) won the distinction !

Aimed at encouraging talented young scholars, the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award goes to the best paper presented by a young author at each of the CESifo Area conferences. Selected candidates are invited to present their work at an Area Conference and an award committee selects the winning paper on the criteria of scientific originality, policy relevance and quality of exposition.

Public economics focuses on the study of government policies related to public finance, taxation, and public expenditure. CESifo’s Public Economics area under the helmsmanship of Claus Thustrup Kreiner (Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality - CEBI, University of Copenhagen), seeks to foster scientific progress in public economics and provides theoretical and empirical analyses of key challenges facing modern societies. 

Antoine Ferey’s paper Redistribution and Unemployment Insurance (read abstract) – which he will be presenting at Sciences Po Research’s FacSem on April 3rd (read more and register!) - is in perfect alignment with this objective. He studies the interactions between redistribution and social insurance policies, more often treated as separate questions by academics and policymakers alike, in the context of unemployment insurance.  Questioning this separation, his paper proposes a novel conceptual framework bridging optimal income taxation and optimal employment insurance and finds (spoiler) that “the steeper the profile of income taxes is, the flatter the profile of unemployment benefits should be, and vice versa.”  This of course has important policy implications for designing future tax-benefit systems.

Congratulations to Antoine Ferey !

Antoine Ferey joined the Department of Economics in 2023 as an Assistant Professor (tenure track). He is also a Research Affiliate of the CESifo Network and of the Institut des politiques publiques. During the Spring Semester, he has been invited by Harvard University to teach a part of their public economics sequence to PhD students.

Prior to joining our faculty, he was an Assistant Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). He received his PhD in Economics from the Centre de recherche en économie et statistique (CREST) and Ecole Polytechnique in 2021, for which he received two PhD Dissertation Awards from the Association française de science économique (AFSE) and from Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris). 

Antoine Ferey's website