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on November 7, 2024
Published on November 7, 2024– Updated on November 7, 2024
Economy, Education and Urban Planning: a Project to Combat Inequalities
In its 2024 call for proposals, CY Initiative supported 17 innovative research projects. Let's take a look at one of the winning projects from the Emergence program, led by Fanny Landaud and Mariona Segú, both teacher-researchers in economics at CY Cergy Paris University.
CY Initiative: Could you introduce yourself and tell us more about your career and your main research themes?
Fanny Landaud: I'm an economics researcher specializing in applied economics at the THEMA laboratory. My main area of interest is inequalities, and in particular educational inequalities.
I aim to understand the determinants of these inequalities and their consequences. I'm also looking at the policies likely to reduce them, including gender inequalities as well as socio-economic inequalities.
I did my PhD at the Paris School of Economics, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Norway. I also spent a few months as a post-doc at Insead. I joined CY Cergy Paris University in 2023.
CY Initiative: You won the CY Initiative's 2024 call for proposals. What does this project involve, and what is its objective?
Fanny Landaud: This project operates at the intersection of educational economics and urban economics. I'm working on it in collaboration with Mariona Segú, a teacher-researcher at the THEMA laboratory. I mainly cover aspects relating to the economics of education, while Mariona Segú works more in the field of urban economics. Our two areas of expertise are complementary.
Fanny Landaud: I'm an economics researcher specializing in applied economics at the THEMA laboratory. My main area of interest is inequalities, and in particular educational inequalities.
I aim to understand the determinants of these inequalities and their consequences. I'm also looking at the policies likely to reduce them, including gender inequalities as well as socio-economic inequalities.
I did my PhD at the Paris School of Economics, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Norway. I also spent a few months as a post-doc at Insead. I joined CY Cergy Paris University in 2023.
CY Initiative: You won the CY Initiative's 2024 call for proposals. What does this project involve, and what is its objective?
Fanny Landaud: This project operates at the intersection of educational economics and urban economics. I'm working on it in collaboration with Mariona Segú, a teacher-researcher at the THEMA laboratory. I mainly cover aspects relating to the economics of education, while Mariona Segú works more in the field of urban economics. Our two areas of expertise are complementary.
For example, we're looking at how school assignment policies can impact residential segregation or, conversely, the consequences of policies aimed at improving neighborhood diversity: do these policies have a direct impact on school diversity? Or are they counteracted by parental avoidance behavior?
CY Initiative: In concrete terms, how will the project be rolled out? How does it address current issues?
Fanny Landaud: The project is based on three main lines of research, which we are working on in parallel. The first concerns school assignment policies and their impact on residential segregation. We will be using Norwegian data on which we have already worked in the past, and supplementing it with new data on neighborhood composition and housing prices.
The second axis focuses on how city policies can impact school segregation. First, using French data, we will work with Mariona and other THEMA colleagues to understand how the composition of a neighborhood and the construction of social housing can increase school diversity or provoke avoidance reactions among parents. In a second phase, using Norwegian data, we will also look at the impact of student housing construction on diversity in universities. By making housing more accessible and affordable, does this enable a slightly more disadvantaged student population to undertake higher education?
The last axis deals with school segregation, focusing on the segregation of friendship networks within schools themselves. Our starting point is an observation: even within a school, friendship networks tend to reproduce pre-existing social structures, with, for example, a clear separation between girls and boys. We want to understand whether teachers' adoption of a pedagogical practice focused on peer learning can generate working interactions between students who usually interact little, and thus break down this “entre-soi”.
For this axis, we will base ourselves on an experiment in partnership with School 42. They have designed a digital learning platform for pupils at the end of elementary school. On this platform, pupils learn the basics of the digital world using a learning method based on cooperation with peers. They are constantly being assessed by their peers, and can also ask their peers for help. We will evaluate the consequences of using this platform using this platform through an experimental method based on random assignment and comparison of a control group with a test group. After one year, we will observe the friendship networks of students in the test and control groups, as well as their cooperativities, to understand whether different pedagogical methods can reduce peer-to-peer contact and the consequences of this peer-to-peer contact.
CY Initiative: Why did you apply for this call for proposals?
Fanny Landaud: The Emergence program is designed as a springboard for producing preliminary results that we can use to submit more ambitious projects at a later date. With Mariona, we'd also like to organize a study day in Cergy to present our initial results and meet several researchers on the themes of education and the urban economy. The aim is to create synergies and generate new ideas.
