Nina Buchmann (PhD student, Stanford) is the first winner of the Daniel Cohen Award

The École normale supérieure - PSL, the Paris School of Economics and Daniel Cohen’s family have decided to honour the memory of Daniel Cohen by creating a prize in his name, generously funded this year by the association des anciens élèves de l’École normale supérieure (A-Ulm) and the rights of the book Daniel Cohen, l’économiste qui voulait changer le monde.

It will be awarded for the first time during the second edition of the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, on Thursday 6 June 2024, by an international committee composed of Esther Duflo (President of the Paris School of Economics), Abhijit Banerjee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Pascaline Dupas (Princeton University), Marc Fleurbaey (PSE, École normale supérieure - PSL), Jean-Marc Tallon (PSE, CNRS) and Gabriel Zucman (PSE, École normale supérieure - PSL).

The Daniel Cohen Award aims to perpetuate Daniel Cohen’s commitment to putting economics at the service of public debate and decision-making.

The jury decided to award the prize to Nina Buchmann, a doctoral student at Stanford University, for her doctoral research, in particular her Job Market Paper "Paternalistic Discrimination". Using data from field experiments in Bangladesh, Nina (and her co-authors) tested the existence of "paternalistic discrimination", defined as the differential treatment of two groups in order to protect one group - even against its will - from harmful or unpleasant situations.

This form of discrimination can take various forms: encouraging women to take less demanding courses of study, limiting their access to certain promotions, not hiring them for jobs considered dangerous, etc. Combating this type of discrimination, particularly by employers, is particularly difficult because of the underlying ‘benevolent’ intentions. Yet the authors show that eliminating paternalistic discrimination would reduce the employment gap between men and women by 24% and increase women’s salaries by 21%.

The ENS - PSL and PSE are delighted to welcome Nina for the award ceremony and warmly congratulate her on her work and on winning this prize.

The Daniel Cohen Award is funded this year by the association des anciens élèves de l’École normale supérieure (A-Ulm).