Introducing Clara von Bismarck-Osten

A warm welcome to Clara, one of our new PhDs.

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We're happy to welcome Clara to the Stone Centre community as one of our new 2025/2026 PhD scholars. Following Clara's recent presentation at the Stone Centre breakfast, we spoke about her academic journey to this point, and her ongoing research.

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Thanks for joining us! Please could you tell us a little about your academic background?

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Boring answer: I have only ever studied economics! From my Baccalauréat (French A-levels) to the PhD.

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But economics is a broad field, and I have travelled within it. I was initially interested in development economics, from which I have moved away both thematically and methodologically: thematically toward questions related to employment and taxation in Europe and, methodologically, toward non-experimental approaches. It seemed to me that the high costs of fieldwork and data collection in development research were frequently not in proportion to the resulting, often quite context-specific, findings. To be able to take on more general questions and work with large administrative databases, I decided to develop a stronger methodological toolkit. And the more I learn about methods, the more interesting I find them in and of themselves!

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What inspired you to pursue the PhD?

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‘The purpose of studying economics is to learn how not to be deceived by economists,’ said Joan Robinson, one of the first female economists. That was in part my purpose too! I have always been very interested in dance and enrolled in economics partly out of frustration with how little respect this interest commands. Economists, on the other hand, enjoy considerable authority in public debates and can intimidate with their number games. To tell high-quality juggling and fraudulent trickery apart, you have to be able to juggle numbers yourself!

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I also like that economics is a practical science. One can endlessly debate about ‘what kind of society would be ideal’; the question of ‘how it works’ offers a large, creative space.

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What is your research about?

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The project that the Stone Centre is supporting aims to do something that economists have been trying to do since the beginning of the discipline: estimate how people respond to changes in taxes. The more ‘elastic’ individuals are found to be, the more harmful it is for the government to raise taxes—which means that the magnitude of this parameter is linked to big questions such as how much to redistribute income with tax and transfers. But better estimates of 'tax elasticities' have immediate practical relevance as well: they are needed to simulate the impact of reforms and calibrate macroeconomic models.

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My project explores a strategy for estimating tax elasticities across the income distribution. The idea is to use a feature of French income tax design that makes otherwise similar individuals experience different tax changes.

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What challenges have you faced?

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The PhD entry exams were very hard. I gave two precious years of my twenties to mathematics!

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Did the Stone Centre breakfast help your research? How?

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The Stone Centre brings together the best inequality scholars in the world. It is very helpful for me to get an inequality angle on my projects!

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