Both globally and within France, the Covid-19 crisis has created substantial and diverse challenges for population health, children’s education, social interactions and the economy, specifically as it relates to small businesses owned and operated by entrepreneurs. Concerning this last point, small businesses – representing 99.9% of companies in France (https://www.economie.gouv.fr/cedef/chiffres-cles-des-pme) – have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. Small businesses in B2C industries have been particularly affected, specifically those that are “store-based” and can no longer welcome customers into their stores due to administrative closures, lockdowns, curfews and subsequent hygiene constraints. The small businesses that today are either closed or in real difficulty are mainly hotels, restaurants, bars and fitness centers. Some are totally independent establishments, while others are chain-affiliated (e.g., to a franchise chain or a cooperative chain). All these businesses are very important to the French economy in terms of dynamism, sales, employment, etc. In this project, we focus on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on hotels, restaurants, bars and fitness centers, specifically in terms of entrepreneurial fear of failure, i.e., a “negative affective reaction based in cognitive appraisals of the potential for failure in the uncertain and ambiguous context of entrepreneurship” (Cacciotti et al., 2020, p. 1). Our main research objective is to better understand and assess this entrepreneurial fear of failure in terms of dimensions (e.g., cognition, affect), antecedents (personal, business, institutional characteristics) and consequences (negative and positive) in the specific context of the Covid-19 crisis. We will build on the nascent literature on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on entrepreneurs (e.g., Pantano et al., 2020; Papadopoulos et al., 2020), the literature on crisis management in the entrepreneurial context (e.g., Doern, 2014; Herbane, 2010), the literature stream that has focused on crisis management in the tourism sector (e.g., Paraskevas and Altinay, 2013) and the literature on entrepreneurial fear of failure (e.g., Cacciotti et al., 2016; Cacciotti et al., 2020; Cacciotti and Hayton, 2015). A more detailed literature review during the first month of the project will allow us to design the articulation of several theories and their extensions, among which are achievement motivation theory (McClelland, 1961), cognitive appraisal theory (Lazarus, 1966), the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998) and coping theory (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). [Task 1] To answer this research objective, the data has to be collected quickly (before the end of summer 2021), while most of these entrepreneurs’ small businesses are totally (e.g., fitness centers) or partly closed (e.g., restaurants), or with low levels of activity (e.g., hotels). This research project is based on two empirical studies conducted in the French market (one qualitative [Task 2], the other quantitative [Task 3]). It will contribute to the research and practice [Task 4]. The research team, led by Dr. Rozenn Perrigot, includes eight researchers from three different research centers: the Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM UMR CNRS 6211) – research center jointly supported by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the University of Rennes 1 and the University of Caen Normandy; the Institute for Research in Organizational Management (IRGO EA 4190) – University of Bordeaux; and the Institute for Research in Management and Economics (IREGE EA 2426).

Time is a scarce and valuable resource for individuals, and reducing the duration of waiting time provides opportunity benefits. Understanding individual preferences for waiting time is important for predicting behaviors in many time-consuming and useless activities (e.g., transportation, queuing, waiting rooms in hospitals, etc.). Moreover, better knowledge of individual behavior towards waiting time is key to designing the improved organization of the activities. Our main research questions concern the shape of individual preferences towards waiting time and the induced properties of two routinely-used measures of it, the value of time (VOT) and the value of reliability (VOR). In most of the literature, waiting time is viewed as a non-market private bad (i.e., waiting time is unpleasant), and the decision maker (DM) has well-defined preferences over both consumption and (possibly random) waiting time. Our research questions concern the shape of the DM’s preferences towards waiting time and the induced properties of the VOT and the VOR when several components from behavioral economics or quality concerns are accounted for. Yet, several elements can impair the relationship between value and preferences predicted by the standard Beckerian theory. First, quality matters, especially the influence of reference points or the nature and the source of uncertainty. Secondly, the quality of the waiting time has been largely neglected in both theoretical and empirical literature, and we wish to close this gap. To answer our research questions, we would mainly rely on incentivized and controlled laboratory experiments and non-incentivized online experiments and will use theoretical investigations as a guide for those empirical settings. Third, because the results may have specific implications for transport policy and, more generally, for a better understanding of individual preferences and behavior involving waiting time, we aim to investigate how new welfare measures can be built upon the improved definition of VOT and VOR.

This project addresses the issue of social separatism and its consequences on the dynamics of inequality. This fundamental research is mostly related to Axis 3 “Spaces and Inequality Places” of the ANR program “Métamorphoses des sociétés: Inégalités-Inégalité”. It also addresses a number of issues of the thematical Axes 2, 4 and 5. We tackle these issues from an economic analysis perspective and develop a theoretical as well as an empirical analysis. Precisely, the research program is organized in 5 tasks, Tasks 1 and 2 being mainly theoretical and Tasks 3, 4, 5 corresponding to the empirical analysis. Task 1 opens the black box of social interactions by considering that the influence of group membership is mediated through social norms and networks. Task 2 tackles the issue of the impact of fiscal policy on social stratification. Task 3 is dedicated to the empirical study of the determinants of economic choices made by some segments of the population affected by segregation. We will use the survey Trajectoires et Origines (TeO) carried out jointly by INED and INSEE. Task 4 deals with the issue of student assignment mechanisms and their consequences on social mixing at school. It will proceed by simulating the effect of particular student assignment mechanisms on social mixing using data from Parisian primary schools. In Task 5, we plan to conduct laboratory experiments in order to identify some discrimination mechanisms and their consequences on social stratification. All these tasks will involve joint works. The team consists of 11 researchers. Finally, the team has not benefited from any external funding to develop this research.

Biological diversity within species is an overlooked but fundamental level of biodiversity which contributes to the stability of ecosystems, as well as to adaptation to heterogeneous and changing environments. The coexistence of specialised ecotypes and morphotypes within a species, as well as adaptation to local environments is promoted by peculiar genomic structural variants called chromosomal inversions. Inversion-associated diversity nevertheless shows contrasting patterns, from widespread polymorphism to fixation between habitats or lineages, and it is still unclear what causes and consequences of such different evolutionary dynamics are. In particular, an inversion behaves and evolves like a large-effect single locus (“supergene”) under selective and demographic processes that shape its evolutionary trajectory. Then, inside the inversion, there is a second level of diversity, the DNA content, that varies and evolves, but the feedback loops between the two levels are poorly understood empirically. In this project, I propose contrasting two adaptive inversions in the seaweed fly Coleopa frigida that follow different evolutionary dynamics: one is widely polymorphic and the other is strongly structured along latitudinal clines. By combining experimental and genomic approaches on four parallel replicates across continents, my team and I will assess the relative role of selection and historical processes in determining inversions' distributions. Then, we will test the prediction that the evolutionary trajectories of inversions condition the evolution of its content. Altogether, those results will shed light on the evolution of genetic and phenotypic diversity within species, and push forward our knowledge about inversions which are widespread structural variants relevant for fitness and adaptation but also human health.

This project is set in the blooming field of singular stochastic partial differential equations (singular SPDEs) that has undergone a revolution two-three years ago, with the joint introduction by Hairer and Gubinelli-Imkeller-Perkowski of entirely new methods. These works have opened a whole field and offer now the possibility to investigate a number of problems that were out of reach so far. We aim in this project to push further the study of their theoretical foundations and to investigate a number of challenging open questions about some special singular equations. 1. Developing the theory. The theory of regularity structures offers a very clean setting for the study of a class of parabolic singular SPDEs, called sub-critical. So far, the probabilistic structure has mainly been used as a tool to set the study of such an equation into the framework of regularity structures, by enriching the noise into a model. It is very likely that the stochastic cancellations inherent to the probabilistic objects will be instrumental in analyzing a number of problems beyond the local well-posedness problem, such as the global well-posedness problem, or the use of Malliavin calculus tools to investigate the existence and regularity of densities for solutions of some classes of singular sub-critical SPDEs. On the paracontrolled side, the theory was originally written as a 'first order Taylor expansion' theory. Despite its successes in recovering a number of results obtained via the theory of regularity structures, its present form prevents a priori its use in a number of problems and hides one of Hairer's other breakthrough, which is the introduction in his theory of a renormalization group. We intend to develop a higher order paracontrolled calculus and introduce in this setting an analogue of the renormalization group. 2. Qualitative properties of particular singular SPDEs. The powerful tools of regularity structures and paracontrolled calculus have mainly been used so far to derive existence, uniqueness and regularity results for singular PDEs. We feel this is the right time to explore further the full power of these techniques, and other techniques, to get a number of qualitative properties of solutions of important examples of singular equations, such as intermittency for the parabolic Anderson model equation, localization for the Anderson Hamiltonian, the study of the KPZ equation in space dimension greater than 1, or the stochastic Yang-Mills equation that comes from Parisi-Wu Euclidean quantization scheme. At the same time, we shall also investigate a number of PDEs for which totally different tools need to be used, such as fully nonlinear parbolic equations.