Research

FR Entre économie politique institutionnaliste, économie des PME et de l’innovation et histoire économique, ma recherche porte sur les institutions du financement public des PME et de l’innovation. Elle se concentre autour de 3 principaux axes :

1. Le changement institutionnel dans l’histoire des dispositifs publics pour le financement des entreprises.
2. Le pouvoir de valorisation des financements publics et la légitimité des organisations et des acteurs qui les portent.
3. Les effets des financements publics sur les trajectoires des entreprises.

Vous trouverez sur cette page un résumé de mes travaux en cours, individuels et collectifs.

EN Somewhere between institutionalist political economy, small business and innovation economics and economic history, my research focuses on the institutions involved in the public financing of SMEs and innovation. It focuses on 3 main areas:

1. Institutional change in the history of public arrangements for corporate financing.
2. The valuation power of public funding and the legitimacy of the organisations and actors behind it.
3. The effects of public funding on company trajectories.

On this page you will find a summary of my work in progress, both individual and collective, as well as my previously published work.

Working papers

• The power of public funding. Various funding instruments and their certication effects

Public agencies finance innovation through a growing variety of instruments, yet we know little about which features of an instrument make its support informative to private financiers. Theories of certification attribute the “stamp of approval” of public funding to selective, expertise-intensive allocation, but the concept is increasingly applied to instruments that satisfy neither condition. We exploit administrative data on three innovation-support instruments administered within a single agency — the French public investment bank (Bpifrance) — between 2014 and 2020: non-competitive innovation grants, competitive innovation contests, and a label granting access to retail innovation funds. Combining genetic matching with staggered difference-in-differences estimators, we find that all three instruments raise recipient firms’ leverage and bank-debt share two years after support, with effects concentrated among younger and smaller firms. The effect arises even for instruments that are neither selective nor expertise-intensive, and the amount of funding does not account for it. The standard signalling account cannot fully accommodate this pattern. We argue that public funding additionally operates through the valuation power that agencies derive from their standing as emanations of the state, and we draw implications for the design of innovation-financing instruments.

• Public financing of the economy in a financialised context: A critical literature review - with Marion Tosolini.

Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature has examined the role of the state in the economy within the financialised accumulation regime. However, despite the proliferation of such studies, this literature remains fragmented, with no real attempt to bring coherence to it. This article pursues three objectives. First, it offers a synthetic review of this scholarship and shows that the investor state and derisking state frameworks form part of a single research programme on the public financing of the financialised economy, and that they help to explain the persistence of financialisation despite its well-documented fragilities. Second, we show through two case studies that the instruments of public financing display strong long-term continuity. Third, we argue that what truly characterises financialised public intervention is not the instruments themselves but the techniques through which they operate and their position within the architecture of public action. This article thereby echoes recent calls for periodisations that articulate continuity and rupture rather than collapse one into the other.

• Turning environmental values into market value. The entrepreneurial work in the committed production market - with Marion Michel.

This article examines entrepreneurship in the eco-friendly consumer goods sector. Using a mixed-methods approach combining semi-structured interviews, online ethnography and company accounting data, it describes the polarisation of the sector between dynamic SMEs and highly precarious one-person businesses. It explains these differences by the ability of certain entrepreneurs to combine the eco-friendly qualities of their products with the use of market value-enhancing devices (advertising, multiple funding sources).