People of PCHES: Florian Grosset

Florian is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Sustainable Development at Columbia University. In his research, he primarily investigates the ways in which individuals, firms, and policy-makers cope with risk – as well as the distortions that their risk-coping strategies induce. To do so, he seeks to integrate insights from the natural sciences (especially ecology and climate science) with approaches and methods from economics.

In one stream of research, he seeks to understand how individuals’ behaviors – primarily labor supply and entrepreneurship – is influenced by their social environment, including informal risk-sharing arrangements. He notably does so through randomized control trials conducted in Côte d’Ivoire.

In a second stream of projects, he aims to study how individuals and firms respond to (environmental) government regulations – especially when they involve dealing with uncertainty.

He especially enjoys learning from and working together with his amazing co-authors at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab. In his free time, he likes exploring his adoptive New York City, its museums and its cultural offerings – as well as jogging.

He currently serves as Lead Teaching Fellow at the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, and has served as a J-PAL Graduate Research Transparency Fellow. Prior to starting his Ph.D., he earned a masters in economics from the Paris School of Economics and spent a semester as graduate visiting student in UC Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in Economics. He holds bachelors from Sciences Po Paris (public policy) and the University of Lorraine (economics). He loves data, field work, theory, and bringing them together.