Alain Paquet's
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Economics helps us to define correctly many different types of problems and leads us to questions about the economic agents' incentives, what affect them and their consequences at both the individual and aggregate levels.

I'm passionate about economics. Numerous experiences through different stages of my academic and non-academic career have never shaken my belief that this field is full of resources for having more informed debates and for ultimately making better public and private choices. Whether as a university teacher, an academic researcher, a consultant, an economic policy advisor or a politician, I keep discovering opportunities to use the tools of economic analysis, to sharpen intuition, to seek solutions and to recognize that we never stop learning.

The economy is inherently dynamic and involves simultaneous equilibria in several interdependent markets : the market for goods and services, the labor market, and the financial markets, both at the domestic and the international levels, for all countries.  This is what we refer to as a dynamic general equilibrium. Everything is basically linked to everything. This is what makes economics both difficult and interesting.

Economics has much changed in the past 40 years. Questions remain at the frontier of research; yet, a broad consensus has developed refusing to raise the old Keynesian or classical prescriptions from the 60s into dogma. Using a new generation of tools, the effects of economic policies are now thought to request analyses within the global perspective of a dynamic general equilibrium framework rather than from partial and static models.  Keynes has said that "in the long run, we are all dead", we now know that we cannot ignore the long-run consequences resulting primarily from the cumulative effect of decisions taken in the short run. The long run deserves to be resulting from sound short-run decisions in the context of an economic environment with the proper incentives. Given the speed of changes associated with globalization and the development and the spread of information technology, most of the long-run effects often occur after five years or so. Yet, as it is the case regarding personal, business or public policy decisions, bad decision tend to have long-lasting effects, while right decisions do not have instantaneous effects.

I am interested to understand and to explain why and how important economic variables evolve over time, how these variables interact, how different types of disturbances (e.g. productivity shocks, changes in fiscal and monetary policies, financial shocks) affect their behaviour and spread throughout the economy, as well as the implications for economic policy. This is what underlies the aggregate performance of the economy with a direct impact on people’s well-being for today and tomorrow.
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Specialized fields :
Open-economy macroeconomics and
monetary theory; business cycles, fiscal
and monetary policy; financial
economics; applied macroeconometrics.

Research interests :
Business cycles; fiscal and monetary
policy; taxation and public debt;
entrepreneurship; innovation; financial
market regulation and savers'
protection; determination of interest
rates and exchange rates; economic
forecasting; portfolio theory.
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