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Junior Research Scientist on Public economics, agro-environnemental policy (Economie publique)

The Public Economics unit is a joint research unit between INRAE, AgroParisTech and the University Paris-Saclay specialized in economics applied to agriculture and the environment.

Your research will contribute to the “Public policies and evolution of land use, production, and ecosystems” research theme which aims to design, analyse, and assess public agro-environmental policy instruments favouring more sustainable agriculture. Your initial research program will address the incentive instruments that allow the integration of the spatial dimensions that are key to the agroecological transition in agricultural landscapes (spatial externalities, threshold effects, coordination of heterogeneous agents that interact strategically). Your research will lead to publications in international, peer-reviewed journals.

In 2022, Public Economics will merge with another research unit, ALISS, and will move to the AgroParisTech-INRAE campus of the University Paris-Saclay. In this context, you will participate in the deployment of the research strategy of the unit on these themes within the University Paris-Saclay.

Transitional assignment to Thiverval-Grignon, and move to Saclay in 2022

Deadline for application: 4th of March 2021

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Junior Research Scientist in in demand-side economics and machine learning (ALISS))

You will be assigned to the ALISS research unit (Food and Social Sciences, 24 permanent staff including 12 researchers). Food demand modelling and causal inference of the effects of private and public policies are two of the strategic orientations of ALISS.

Your main mission will be to renew the methods used up until now in the unit, using machine learning (ML) methods, to improve understanding of consumer behaviour with the aim of contributing to the evaluation of food policies. Your mission will initially be to produce estimations of demand models using ML methods. These methods, through the reduction of the problem sizes and the selection of relevant explanatory variables, provide innovative and ambitious solutions to deal with the limits of the current empirical approaches to demand analysis. The ALISS research unit works with very large choice sets of consumer products, provided by scanner consumer data.

The first mission, using ML methods, will consist in contributing to the identification of substitutability patterns among food products to improve the understanding of consumer decisions, as well as the impact assessment of public and private interventions. Second, your mission will deal with the estimation of the causal effect of an intervention within the framework of ML, when the intervention counterfactual is not observed. ML methods will be used to predict such counterfactuals in food policy evaluations.

You will strengthen the team that analyses food consumption behaviour. You will benefit from ALISS's work facilities and numerous databases and its strong skills in demand modelling and structural econometrics.

You will also join the Saclay network of the unit in the field of artificial intelligence. You will also benefit from the unit's strong involvement in the DATAIA institute through its “Health and well-being” application domain. The links with the research units of the INRAE division MathNum (Mathematics and Digital Technologies) will also provide support for your future scientific developments. You will also participate in the discussions and developments of the INRAE ODALIM data platform dedicated to food (consumption, purchasing, product composition, manufacturing processes, and the environmental, toxicological and sensory dimensions of food), coordinated by ALISS.

Deadline for application: 4th of March 2021

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