Home>Michele Fioretti Receives a Prize for His Research on Firms' Real Social Impact
08.06.2023
Michele Fioretti Receives a Prize for His Research on Firms' Real Social Impact
The Association Française de Science Économique (the French Economic Association, AFSE) announced the 2023 laureate of its Prix Edmond Malinvaud: Michele Fioretti. He is the fourth Sciences Po's researcher to be awarded this prize since its launch in 2010.
The AFSE is a nonprofit organisation founded in 1950. It aims at promoting exchange of knowledge and participation of its members in public debates on economic policies. It is open to all economists, whether they work in universities, public research organisations, government bodies or private companies. Every year, the AFSE awards the Prix Edmond Malivaud, a prize for the best paper published in an indexed EconLit, peer-reviewed journal in the past two years by a young economist affiliated to a French laboratory.
Our Department of Economics permanent faculty member Michele Fioretti is awarded the 2023 Prix Edmond Malivaud. He has been chosen as laureate of this prize for his paper entitled Caring or pretending to care? Social impact, firms’ objectives, and welfare, published in November 2022 in the Journal of Political Economy. Michele will receive his prize at the AFSE’s Annual Congress that the Department of Economics has the honour of hosting on 14 to 16 June, 2023.
The jury wanted to shed light on the topic of firms’ social responsibility for which only a limited amount of literature aiming at quantifying possible impacts is available. This paper has the merit of opening the black box of social impact to understand the welfare implications for concerned agents. In particular, results obtained by Michele highlight that consumers might have a limited role in explaining corporate prosocial expenses. Therefore, social impact implies a trade-off between the payoffs to the firm and its suppliers rather than between the payoffs to the firm and its consumers, suggesting new avenues of research, as most of the social responsibility literature focuses on consumer choices.
The jury especially appreciated the combination of techniques carried out by Michele: micro data analysis with large data sets, econometric methods, development of a new structural model to disentangle drivers of supply and demand. Throughout this single-author paper, Michele shows that he masters the toolkit of modern economists and uses it efficiently to shed light on a major topic.
Michele’s research interests include empirical industrial organisation, behavioural economics, and applied microeconomics. His work focuses on understanding firms' strategies with applications on social impact firms and sectors with a social dimension such as the health and the energy sectors. He is currently working on a 2-year project related to governance problems in decentralised networks with the support of the McCourt Institute.
Congratulations to Michele Fioretti!
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