Lauréat du Prix Malinvaud 2023

The jury of the Malinvaud Prize 2023 is pleased to award 

Michele Fioretti (Sciences Po)

for his paper entitled  

Caring or Pretending to Care? Social Impact, Firms’ Objectives, and Welfare

published in 2022 in the Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 130, Issue 11, pp. 2898-2942

The jury of the Malinvaud Prize 2023 was composed by Ghazala Azmat (Sciences Po), Pierre Boyer (Ecole Polytechnique), Isabelle Méjean (Sciences Po), Céline Poilly (AMSE) and Fabien Tripier (Univ. Paris Dauphine), and was chaired by Laurent Ferrara (Skema Business School).

The jury wanted to shed light on the topic of firms’ social responsibility for which only a limited amount of literature aiming at quantifying possible impacts is available. This paper has the merit of opening the black box of social impact to understand the welfare implications for concerned agents. In particular, results obtained by Michele highlight that consumers might have a limited role in explaining corporate prosocial expenses. Therefore, social impact implies a trade-off between the payoffs to the firm and its suppliers rather than between the payoffs to the firm and its consumers, suggesting new avenues of research, as most of the social responsibility literature focuses on consumer choices.  

The jury specially appreciated the combination of techniques carried out by Michele: micro data analysis with large data sets, econometric methods, development of a new structural model to disentangle drivers of supply and demand. Throughout this single-author paper, Michele shows that he masters the toolkit of modern economists and uses it efficiently to shed light on a major topic.

Michele FIORETTI joined the Department of Economics in Sciences Po in 2019 as an Assistant Professor, just after defending his thesis at the University of Southern California (USC). Before his PhD, Michele FIORETTI acquired an MPA in Political Economy at the London School of Economics and then an MA in Economics at USC.

His research interests include empirical industrial organization, behavioral economics, and applied microeconomics. His work focuses on understanding firms' strategies with applications on social impact firms and sectors with a social dimension such as the health and the energy sectors.