The effects of increasing global temperatures on soil biodiversity and the resulting effects on the coupling/decoupling of biogeochemical C, N, P cycles are poorly understood. This project attempt to assess the biodiversity and functional composition of soil microbial communities, including soil fauna (earthworms) and plant-soil interactions responses to soil warming using three whole soil warming experiments established in France, USA and China. We will focus our study on whole soil profiles, as in particular subsoil horizons may have a large temperature response to warming and could release carbon to the atmosphere as positive feedback mechanism. The information obtained through the data generated by our project will be used to benchmark an existing simulation model, which includes representation of soil depth, transport, and microbial physiology of functional guilds. The simulations outcomes can then support the formulation of policies to promote adaptation and mitigation strategy.

The goal of this project is to enrich the scientific knowledge of the relationship between the location of Intellectual Property (IP) assets, R&D efforts and taxation, and of the implications in terms of profit shifting. There is a large consensus both in the academic literature and policy discussions, also supported by anecdotal evidence, that R&D, IP, and the associated opaque transfer pricing and internal fee payments are important means for multinationals to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. Yet, systematic large-scale empirical evidence on the topic is lacking. The TaxIP project aims at filing this gap. It will uncover the relationship between IP, R&D, taxes, and profit-shifting strategies using firm-level systematic data linked to patent data. It will leverage information reported directly by multinationals to statistical and fiscal authorities, only newly accessible to researchers, match it to patent and tax data, and use a set of empirical techniques to tackle so far unanswered research questions. The project will yield novel results through three original axes. First, we aim to quantify the amounts of profit shifted using IP, considering both patent transfer (mis-)prices and licensing fee payments and disentangling the two channels. The goal is to provide a first estimation of the magnitude of the phenomenon. Second, we will investigate the relationship between taxes and the location of R&D efforts through the angle of R&D subcontracting. The objective is to document and quantify the role of internal subcontracting in profit-maximizing strategies. Third, we will evaluate the impact of recent “nexus requirements”, which limit the extent to which firms can distort the locations of R&D and patents for tax purposes. The goal is to provide a better understanding of the role that taxes play in R&D efforts and IP location decisions and to study how more stringent rules can deter tax avoidance. In addition to contributing to the existing academic literature by pushing the frontier of scientific knowledge, this project is also relevant for policymakers and the wider audience. As revealed by the Global Tax Evasion Report 2024 of the EU Tax Observatory, profit shifting by multinationals remains important despite various policy initiatives. Thus, understanding the mechanisms behind these behaviors and quantifying the amounts at stake is of utmost importance.

With deepening globalization of food markets, demand for higher quality agricultural products has been rising rapidly in Sub Saharan Africa. Yet, lack of farm-level quality recognition in domestic value chains frequently fails to give incentives to smallholder farmers to improve quality, putting them at risk of being displaced on their own markets by high quality imports. This is what has been happening with wheat in Ethiopia. We propose to study the introduction of a new third-party quality certification system for wheat on local markets. A key feature of this innovation is that it will make cost effective the certification of quality at the smallholder farmer level, before any aggregation is operated by traders in selling to mills that do practice quality recognition and price discrimination. Conducted in partnership with an international NGO (Digital Green) and coordinated with an Ethiopian government agency (the Agricultural Transformation Agency), the market-level experiment will use a randomized controlled trial to assess: (1) how farmer-purchased certification affects farmer-level price premiums for quality (price pass-through); (2) what is the price elasticity of farmers’ demand for certification services; (3) how certification encourages farmers to adopt quality-enhancing inputs and practices as elements of an agricultural transformation (behavioral response); (4) what are the marketed-surplus and poverty-reduction impacts of this value chain development. If successful, this one-time intervention is expected to induce a scalable and sustainable transformation of the wheat value chain with an important role for smallholder farmers. The research team will consist of international experts from the University of Bordeaux, the University of California at Berkeley and the International Food Policy research Institute, with over 15 years of previous collaboration on related topics. The team will be completed with a full time PhD student, along-side with extensive field work in Ethiopia. The project will yield several types of outcomes, including but not limited to: (1) A unique dataset, available for downloads, linking farmers’ production behavior with their marketing outcomes, in contexts of high versus low information on product quality. (2) A set of research papers published in leading academic journals, complemented by a series of policy-notes and blogs targeted at non-academic audience. (3) A large scale academic and policy conference, focused on markets for development, to serve as a base for a renewed interest in issues of market inefficiencies and potential solutions in low-income countries. Funding from ANR is sought to cover support for the PhD student for three years, including costs related to field work for close to one year, and academic conferences/seminars. The project will also support field missions and conferences/seminars for senior researchers. Last, the project will cover the cost of the end-of-project academic and policy conference. Additional resources will be leveraged to cover survey costs from ATAI (a dedicated fund supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and the UK Department for International Development) and the CGIAR (Global Consortium for International Agricultural Research), both of which have already expressed strong interest for the project.

The field of the Digital Humanities has developed both in France and globally over the last decade, in line with the penetration of digital technologies into all levels of society and the academic sphere. Coined by Unsworth and Siemens in 2004, the term ‘digital humanities’ was originally intended to signal a shift away from the first phase of humanities computing, which largely involved the digitisation of texts through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Doing ‘digital humanities’ has since comprised the application of computational methods to the study of texts and also the application of the critical theoretical methodologies of the contemporary humanities to digital objects. It thus overlaps with media studies, which looks at the relationship between technology and the kinds of thought and cultural expression to which different technologies give rise. It has begun to converge, too, in this respect, with the emerging discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which analyses the relationship between technological cultures (scientific instruments, institutional practices) and the formation of scientific knowledge. Just as the digital humanities subsumed the earlier field of the computational humanities, we now argue that the time has come for the digital humanities to be superseded and subsumed within the broader field of digital studies. This is in recognition of the way that all fields of knowledge, including not just the humanities but the social and ‘hard’ sciences, and all aspects of social organisation, are reinvented with every change in the technical systems that constitute culture. With the advent of the digital, this reinvention has been both creative and traumatic in equal measure. Science has been revolutionised by new techniques that permit the unprecedented sharing of data (the human genome project, the compilation of climate data), but has stumbled over intellectual copyright and the privatisation of knowledge, not to mention the profound ‘flattening’ of scientific expertise that comes with the proliferation of media and the prospect of undifferentiated access to all manner of different opinions (Bruno Latour). Similar issues of access are transforming the spheres of politics and the economy (the replacement of ‘professional’ classes with unpaid, free content: from HuffPo to ‘Uberisation’). In each of these cases, we are seeing the realignment of existing social structures around an economy of contribution, in which knowledge is produced not by private, proprietorial users who buy and sell information, but by collaborative participants and amateurs who make their data open to and modifiable by all. Digital Studies is the field of research that takes this emerging ‘economy of contribution’ as one of its objects and systematically investigates the epistemic and epistemological stakes of this new state of affairs in the field of knowledge. The purpose of this bid is to bring together researchers across institutions in Europe, Asia and North and South America to build an international Digital Studies Network, focusing on the way in which society and its institutions are being transformed by digital culture, and by different technologies more generally. In addition to these theoretical and epistemological dimensions, the network will also develop open-source technologies to foster the growth of the economy of contribution as well as new instruments for contributive research. This is where we want to develop an ambitious European and international research program (FET-Exchange) on technologies for contributive categorization, annotation, certification and editorialization with the goal of developing an hermeneutic and negentropic conception of the world wide web.

What? This project is about identifying important chemical processes responsible for poor air quality in our indoor environments. The project will examine how abundant chemical pollutants directly emitted from indoor source such as building materials and furnishing may undergo chemical reactions in the indoor air and on surfaces. Such reactions are hypothesized to result in in the transformation of relatively benign indoor pollutants into ones that have adverse health outcomes: an until now understudied source of bad indoor air quality. The project will furthermore examine how indoor chemistry is affected by the intrusion of outdoor air and how rising air pollution in urban areas may change our exposure to organic pollutants in our homes, offices, schools and institutions. Why? Humans spend 90% of their time indoors: consequently, human exposure to most air pollutants is actually dominated by indoor rather than outdoor conditions. Recent research has shown that the air within our homes can be more heavily polluted by organic chemicals than the outdoor air. The suspected reactivity of these chemicals in combination with the large surface areas of the indoor environments makes for a potent chemical reactor, especially when considering the unavoidable intrusion of reactive species from rising outdoor air pollution. This project is important as it provides new insight into the sources of bad indoor air quality and thus may aid in the development of more intelligent solution to improve the quality of the air we breathe and consequentially our health and well-being. How? The research will be based on detailed chemical analysis of air and surfaces in real and laboratory-controlled indoor environments. Emissions and chemical reactions of commonly found indoor pollutants will be studied along with the impacts of changing indoor parameters, e.g. temperature, light, humidity and ventilation. The formation of airborne and surface-bound pollutants from indoor chemical processes will be investigated in environments such as class rooms, offices, and homes. In addition, indoor chemistry facilitated by increased intake of outdoor air pollution will be simulated in real indoor environments and in the laboratory to understand the risks associated with inadvertent intrusion or deliberate ventilation with polluted outdoor air.