Sébastien Montpetit

Sébastien Montpetit is a Postdoctoral fellow and course instructor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. 

Prior to joining the Munk School, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warwick. He received his Ph.D. from the Toulouse School of Economics. He also completed an M.A. in Economics at McGill University and a B.Sc. in Economics at Université du Québec à Montréal.

Dr. Montpetit's research interests lie primarily in the fields of public economics and family economics. He focuses on understanding gender differences in socioeconomic outcomes and the public policies that can help narrow these gaps, as well as on developing empirical methods for welfare analysis of complex reforms. He studies these questions by combining rich microdata with causal inference techniques and structural models.

In his research in empirical public economics, he studies the welfare impacts of universal childcare provision and subsidies for green technologies. This work notably explores the extent to which sufficient-statistics approximations of welfare effects can be applied to non-marginal reforms and develops structural approaches to address their limitations. In gender and family economics, beyond childcare programs, he also studied veiling and the economic participation of Muslim women in France, as well as gender differences in the intergenerational transmission of violence victimization. He also contributes to improving reproducibility and transparency in economics research through his involvement with the Institute for Replication.

His work has been published or is forthcoming in Nature and the Canadian Journal of Economics. His work is featured in several media outlets such as The New York Times, Le Monde, Le Devoir, La Presse, and Radio-Canada Ottawa. He is also the recipient of the Best Paper Award 2026 of the Network of Industrial Economists and the second place for the Best Young Researcher Paper Prize 2024 of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum.