Jean-Charles Rochet laureate of the 2019 Maurice Allais Prize for Economic Science

The 2019 Maurice Allais Prize in Economic Science is awarded to Fabrice Collard (Toulouse School of Economics), Michel Habib (University of Zurich), and Jean-Charles Rochet (GSEM - University of Geneva) for their article "Sovereign debt sustainability in advanced economies" published in the Journal of European Economic Association.

In this article, the authors develop a measure of maximum sustainable government debt for advanced economies. It abandons the classical assumption that governments choose the level of sovereign debt that maximizes some measure of social welfare; it proposes instead a “Public Choice” theory of sovereign debt, whereby government debt is chosen by self‐interested politicians.

This year and for the first time, the Maurice Allais Prize for Economic Science is shared between two applications. In fact, the Prize was also awarded to Philippe Mongin (CNRS and HEC Paris) for his article “The Allais paradox: what it became, what it really was, what it now suggests to us”

The Maurice Allais Prize in Economic Science is awarded once every two years. It aims to extend the legacy of Maurice Allais by promoting research based on a real scientific approach and the rejection of approaches based on ideological assumptions.