Stéphane Bonhomme

Since 2018, he is co-director of the Big Data Initiative at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

In 2017, together with Thibaut Lamadon, he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant.

In 2017, he was elected fellow of the Econometric Society, and in 2019, fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics.

In parallel, he has held different editorial positions, including Managing Editor at the Review of Economic Studies (2011-2015), Co-editor of the Econometric Society Monograph Series (2018-2021), Associate Editor of the Journal of Econometrics (2018-2021), and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic Methods. Currently, he is the Editor of Quantitative Economics.

From 2011 to 2015, he was awarded with a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.

He initiated his tenure track at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) in 2005. From 2009 to 2010, he was assistant professor at New York University. In 2010, he became professor at CEMFI, where he remained until 2013, when he joined The University of Chicago as professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics.

Bonhomme has also contributed to better understanding the evolution of earnings inequality and mobility both in Spain and in France. His studies in the Spanish context have uncovered two key dimensions of this phenomenon: first, the cyclicality of inequality and, second, the inequality in the uncertainty about future income. Using Spanish Social Security data, his work documents that since the end of the 1980’s male inequality has been strongly countercyclical, partly reflecting the effects of the housing boom and bust on the construction sector. His more recent research proposes a method to measure individual income risk using administrative data and shows that income risk is highly unequal in Spain: more than half of the economy has close to perfect predictability of their income, while some face considerable uncertainty. Indeed, in Spain, income risk inequality amplifies income inequality, increases in downturns and has the most impact on the younger population. For France, his research documents whether and how much the equalizing force of earnings mobility changed in the 1990s. For this purpose, his study builds a model of earnings dynamics that combines a flexible modelling of the marginal distributions (inequality) with a tight parameterization of the dynamics (mobility). Estimating the model on the French Labor Force Survey, results show that earnings mobility decreases when cross-section inequality and unemployment risk increase. In addition, by simulating individual earnings trajectories and computing present values of lifetime earnings for various horizons, it is possible to calculate a natural measure of immobility or of the persistence of inequality as the ratio of inequality in present values to inequality in one-year earnings. That ratio remains remarkably constant over the business cycle in France.