Mathieu Couttenier has obtained his PhD in Economics in 2011 at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics. Before to join the University of Lyon and Ecole Normale Superieur (September 2018), he was Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva. He was also post-doc at the University of Lausanne, visiting researcher at the department of political sciences at Stanford and at the economic department at Sciences Po Paris.
His research is filled with interactions between economics and political sciences but also cultural, institutional and geographical issues. He focuses on microeconomic questions, in particular in the field of applied political economy. His main research interests are in the understanding of violence and civil wars. He has published many academic papers on the role played by income shocks, natural resources or climate on the diffusion of conflicts over space and time. Some of his present research agenda also studies the political economy aspects of media coverage or of international economics. He has published in many leading peer-refereed journals, such as the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Comparative Economics.