While France benefits from abundant and cheap food, and purchasing power is steadily increasing according to public statistics, food poverty has been increasing in this country as well as in other European countries for the last 10 years. To elucidate this paradox, this project implements research on food poverty in France. First, it develops an original statistical survey in general population, in partnership with Crédoc, in order to characterize and measure food poverty. In addition to this survey, ethnographic surveys are conducted at a territorial level, linking household budget adjustment strategies, material and temporal supply practices, solidarity and social protection issues. This project aims at renewing the view on the poor and their living conditions in rich countries by identifying the conditions for a transition to healthy and sustainable diets. By proposing a sociology of poverty based on living conditions, it contributes to the current debates on social solidarity, particularly around the establishment of a social security of food.

The “Value of Corporate Science” (VCS) project aims to provide a better understanding of whether and how European business companies invest in fundamental research as part of their innovation strategy and overall performance. In particular, the VCS project will investigate three dimensions of firm performance that may be affected by corporate science, namely: the stock market evaluation of private firms turning public through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) (WP.1 and WP.2); the stock market evaluation of large, established companies active in technology markets (WP.3) and the competitive advantage and organizational resilience value, as derived from corporate research in times of crisis (WP.4). To these purposes, the VCS project will collect and link different types of firm-level data such as: scientific publications (from Web of Science-WOS), patents (from Orbit and PATSTAT/EP Register database), IPO announcements and outcomes, stock prices and valuations (from EURIPO, Datastream and BVD Orbis IP); patent transactions and M&As (from BVD Orbis IP and Zephyr) and de-listings, by type. The VCS project requires expertise in a wide range economics field (corporate finance, innovation, and strategic management), in line with the composition of the team. The VCS project will provide a deeper understanding of the incentive structure for firms to engage in fundamental research and eventually publish their results, thus helping both entrepreneurs and managers about to better understand how to get more value from their scientific disclosure activities. Finally, the VCS project’s results will help policy makers to design interventions supporting firms' R&D and value capture efforts.

“The best way to send knowledge from one place to another is to wrap it up in a person”. This famous quote by Robert Oppenheimer depicts the importance of individuals in acquiring and transferring knowledge. Among individuals acting as vectors for knowledge transfer, PhD graduates, a highly educated labor force sitting at the knowledge frontier, are in a privileged position to spread knowledge related to novel technologies. One such technology is today Artificial Intelligence (AI), which governments in all advanced countries support through large investments in universities and public research organizations. The AI-Edu project focuses on France and seeks answers to three research questions: (i) Where are French PhD students trained in AI? (ii) What are the determinants of students’ AI training during the PhD period? (iii) How does students’ training in AI affect their careers, productivity, and professional networks? AI-Edu uses microdata at the individual level, including the whole population of French PhD graduates in STEM from 2000 to 2022. For each PhD graduate, we collect thesis, publication, and patent information. We assess the AI content of each thesis by analyzing the text of its title and abstract using neural network algorithms for text analysis. We also interview PhD students and supervisors to shed light on the micro-mechanisms leading to AI training during the PhD and driving AI training impact. Policymakers and the French government benefit from AI-Edu results by having a complete assessment of drivers and the impact of AI training for the entire population of PhD graduates over time and across scientific and technological fields. AI-Edu also contributes to the labor market literature with an unprecedented analysis of the supply of AI-trained individuals and to the education literature studying PhD students’ training outcomes.

The efficiency of financial markets depends on timely and accurate information about companies, including non-financial information. Sustainability reporting, which enables companies to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities and their impact on society, is crucial for informed investment decisions and risk pricing. With the growing interest in socially responsible investing, initiatives have been developed to encourage better reporting. In Europe, for example, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) has been implemented in 2021, and in the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has released its long-awaited proposals on climate disclosure for US public companies. However, many companies are not voluntarily providing this information (Ilhan et al., 2023), suggesting countervailing considerations. The SFM project aims to examine different measures of corporate performance in relation to sustainability and to explore in depth the implications of sustainable reporting for corporate behaviour in general and for the secondary market in particular. The project proposes several ways to advance the importance of ESG in promoting ethical and socially responsible investment, including developing and disseminating innovative research designs, proposing new measures of ESG disclosure, and tackling greenwashing in corporate ESG reporting. The results of the SFM project will be crucial for companies, investors and policy-makers, highlighting the role of ESG in ethical investment. It can help companies understand the strategic importance of sustainability reporting, help investors assess its importance in investment decisions, and help policymakers design policies that support companies' sustainability reporting efforts.