Clemence Tricaud

Biography

Clemence Tricaud joined the UCLA Anderson faculty in 2020 after earning her Ph.D. in economics from the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) at École Polytechnique in Paris, France. “Economics is an amazing toolbox for studying people’s behavior and public policies,” Tricaud says. “It’s not about what the public policy aimed to do or what the policymaker has in mind, but really about the actual impact. It’s not about what people claim, it is about looking at what people actually do and inferring the determinants of their behaviors.” 

Her research focuses primarily on two areas, political economy and public economics. Tricaud studies voters’ and candidates’ behavior: why voters turn out to vote, how they choose whom to vote for, why candidates enter political races, why they strike alliances with other parties, which types of information political agents use to make their decisions and, ultimately, how it matters for who gets elected.

She also studies local public policy, specifically, interjurisdictional policies and what happens when neighboring municipalities must jointly make decisions regarding public policy. Her goal is to assess the impact of jurisdiction size on public policies and welfare, and identify optimal decision making strategies.

In the classroom, Tricaud will teach Managerial Economics in Anderson’s MBA program. “It’s an amazing moment when you can get students to understand what economics is really about,” she says. “If you just teach the models as they are, it’s really hard to get what economics is about. What I would like students to understand is how powerful (the economics) toolbox can be and how it can help them in their business decisions and in their daily lives, both theoretically and empirically through the use of data.”

Before coming to Anderson, Tricaud was a visiting scholar in Harvard University’s Department of Economics. She is the author (with Harvard Professor Vincent Pons) of “Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates,” which is published in the journal Econometrica. In 2019, she earned honorable mention from the Urban Economics Association for her paper “Better Alone? Evidence on the Costs of Intermunicipal Cooperation.”