PhD Candidate in Economics
CY Cergy Paris Université (THEMA) and ESSEC Business School
On the 2026–2027 academic job market
My research is in public and labor economics. I study how income taxes and benefits should be designed when labor markets are imperfect: when wages are bargained collectively, employers have wage-setting power, and firms’ investment and technology respond to policy.
I study optimal redistributive taxation when unions bargain over wages after firms have sunk their capital. Collective bargaining then creates two distortions: wages above market-clearing levels ration jobs, and unions appropriate part of the return to sunk capital, so firms underinvest. Because the firm-specific capital exposed to this hold-up cannot be verified by the tax authority, it cannot be subsidized directly; taxes on work and unemployment benefits affect investment only through equilibrium wages and employment. I derive a sufficient-statistics formula for optimal participation taxes in which the standard equity–efficiency trade-off gains an investment term: the social value of capital times the response of investment to the tax. A higher tax on work raises investment if and only if it reduces unions’ claims on the return to capital by more than it reduces capital’s productivity, a condition that depends only on labor-market responses. In a calibration to France, hold-up reduces the optimal participation subsidy for low-wage work relative to a unionized economy without hold-up, while leaving the taxation of high-wage work essentially unchanged.
Presented at Public Economic Theory Conference (PET), Lisbon, 2025 · Journées Louis-André Gérard-Varet (LAGV), Marseille, 2025 · CNRS Thematic School on Public Policy Evaluation (ETEPP), Paris, 2025
This paper studies optimal redistributive income taxation when wages are set through union bargaining and the direction of technical change is endogenous. It characterizes how income taxes steer innovation and, through it, compress pre-tax wage inequality.
This project studies the design of redistributive income taxes when employers hold wage-setting power and workers bargain collectively.
Teaching Assistant for all courses listed.
Olivier Charlot
Professor of Economics
CY Cergy Paris Université (THEMA)
Advisor
Laurence Jacquet
Professor of Economics
CY Cergy Paris Université (THEMA)
Advisor
Omar Al Humsi