Sébastien Montpetit wins best paper award at the Network of Industrial Economists Symposium and Conference 2026

Sébastien Montpetit wins best paper award at the Network of Industrial Economists Symposium and Conference 2026

Dr Sébastien Montpetit, Warwick Economics Postdoctoral Fellow, has been awarded the prize for the Best Paper in Industrial Economics at the Network of Industrial Economists Symposium 2026.

His paper, Are Climate Policies Marginal? A Welfare Evaluation of Environmental Reforms, co-authored with Jean-Francois Fournel of Harvard University, proposes a new empirical framework to help policymakers decide which climate investments to prioritise, given limited public funds.

The new framework combines the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) with structural models of demand for green technologies to evaluate the welfare effects of environmental reforms. The authors argue that this new methodology has several advantages over the standard sufficient-statistics tradition in public economics.

As proof-of-concept, the paper applies the new framework to evaluate the effectiveness of Canadian electric vehicle subsidies. The analysis found that initial subsidies yielded substantial welfare gains, but these did not last. These diminishing returns make large subsidies inefficient.

They also find that investing in charging-station deployment generated the highest welfare gains in the Canadian setting, while taxing fuel-inefficient vehicles was not an efficient funding source.

Commenting on the award, Dr Montpetit said:

"I am honoured to receive this prize, especially given how recently my collaboration with Jean-François, my coauthor, began.

I also greatly appreciated the very positive feedback on our paper from the conference participants, and the insightful suggestions for improvement from my discussant, David Paton.

We see this paper as bridging the welfare analysis tradition in public economics with methods from industrial economics—two approaches that have largely evolved in isolation.

It is therefore especially rewarding that experts in industrial economics have recognized our contribution, and I am grateful for this recognition."

The Best Paper Award is sponsored by Charles River Associates and recognises outstanding early career research in theoretical and empirical industrial economics.

The Department congratulates Sébastien on this well-deserved recognition.

NOTES

• Dr Montpetit is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. He received his PhD from the Toulouse School of Economics. More information about his research can be found on his personal website: Sébastien Montpetit
• Established in the 1970s, the Network of Industrial Economists is a forum for interchange among university economists in the UK and the world, and for interaction between academia, business, and government.
• Details of the 2026 NIE Conference and PhD Symposium can be found here: https://ind-econ.github.io/conference2026/