By Anaïs Fabre, post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Assistant Professor of Economics, LMU Munich from October 2025

Winner of the AFSE 2025 Economics Dissertation Prize, Anaïs Fabre presents in this post the results of the first chapter of her dissertation " Essays on Higher Education Access and Econometrics", written under the supervision of Thierry Magnac and Olivier de Groote and defended at the Toulouse School of Economics. It highlights the importance of the geography of the higher education system in shaping skill differentials in local labor markets. It shows that obstacles to student mobility, combined with the uneven geographical distribution of higher education institutions in France, are a major factor in the emergence of skills gaps.in France, are a key factor in disparities in educational levels between individuals, and fuel the spatial concentration of skills through migration dynamics.

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