Yves Zenou is a French-Swedish economist. He is a professor at Monash University and holds the Richard Snape Chair in Business and Economics.
Zenou's main research focus is in the field of network economics. He has applied his research to crime, labor, development and other issues in economics. He is the author of ‘Urban Labor Economics’ and ‘Economic Analyses of Social Networks’ and has published various research articles.
He was a co-editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics for ten years, between 2007 and 2017. He has been an Associate editor of many journals such as Games and Economic Behavior, the Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Urban Economics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics and Journal of Public Economic Theory. He has also obtained many research grants from the Australian Research Council, the Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Vetenskapsrådet, the Norface Research Program, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Education
Zenou completed his master's degree in economics and econometrics in 1987 from the Paris Nanterre University. In 1991, he earned his PhD in economics from Panthéon-Assas University. In 1998, he completed the "Agrégation des Facultés de Droit et de Sciences Economiques", the exam for becoming a professor in France.
Career
Zenou started his career as an assistant professor at Panthéon-Assas University in 1992. Then, he became a research fellow at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, from 1994 to 1996. He became an associate professor from 1996 till 1998 at Pantheon-Assas University. Then, he became a professor of economics at the Université du Maine, Le Mans, France in 1998 until 2000. He was a professor of economics at the University of Southampton in the UK from 2000 till 2003, a senior research fellow at Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) from 2003 till 2007, and a professor of economics at Stockholm University from 2007 until 2016.
In 2016, Zenou joined Monash University as a professor and was appointed the Richard Snape Chair in Business and Economics. Zenou has research associations with the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM).
Research
Zenou has been working in different areas in economics such as urban economics, labor economics, development economics, game theory, network economics, crime, segregation, discrimination, etc. both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. He developed the concept of ‘key player’ in network economics to help determine the individuals/agents that are the key actors in an economy. In crime, key players are the criminals who, once removed, lead to the highest reduction in total criminal activity. Originally developed for analyzing criminal activity, the key player theory is proving useful across multiple settings, such that of banking, crime, financial markets, macroeconomics, developing economies, and R&D issues. By identifying these key players, the outcomes were found to be more efficient than when targeting other agents such as the most active ones.
Zenou researched in 1999 about the reasons why rich families tend to live in the center of European cities such as Paris and why poor families tend to reside in the center of American cities such as downtown Detroit. Using an amenity-based theory, Zenou and his co-authors showed that the location of different income groups is related to the spatial pattern of amenities (such as restaurants, theatres, parks, etc.) in a city. Zenou takes the example of Paris (where there is a higher average income in the center) and compares with Detroit (where there is a lower average area income in the central area). The main result is to show that the rich in European cities are sensitive to the amenities provided by the center of the cities and are, therefore, more inclined to live in a city's central area if it has a greater amenity advantage over the suburbs. The opposite is true is American cities.
In 2009, Zenou published an article about ‘Peer Effects and Social Networks in Education’. This was the first article that investigated how the position in the network of each student affects his or her education outcome. It shows that being more central in a network does have a positive impact on the grades of the students because of the complementarity of study efforts between different peers in the same classroom.