Jean-Jacques Laffont et l'économie appliquée

This paper is an attempt to review some of the most significant contributions of Jean-Jacques Laffont to the applied side of economics. Early in his career, Laffont took the view that economic science is a tool for action. After some work on econometric methods rooted in some deep economic questions, he embarked in the formidable enterprise of bringing modern industrial organization models to real world. Formal theories of imperfect competition, auctions, contracts and regulation in turn had undergone Laffont’s test of explanatory and predictive power. We report on some of the episodes of this great adventure that got Jean-Jacques Laffont involved with economic data.