Flora Bellone

The GREDEG research unit at Université Côte d’Azur , a joint research unit of UniCA and CNRS, is recruiting a research engineer or postdoctoral researcher to contribute to the Geopolitical Risks, Innovation and Firm Strategy (GRIFS) project. GRIFS is a collaborative research project funded through the ANR 2026 call and coordinated by Flora Bellone and Simone Vannuccini , with partner laboratories at the RITM, Université Paris-Saclay and the LEO, Université de Tours . The project brings together expertise in international economics, innovation, and geo-economics within a multidisciplinary research environment. The research focuses on how firms’ invention directions may change as their import and export patterns shift under structural changes in international dependencies and intensifying global rivalry. The appointed researcher will support the empirical work of the project, working with linked French firm-level and patent datasets. The project will examine the exposure of inventions to traded products and estimate how inventive activity responds to trade-related shocks and changes in geopolitical tensions. A key part of the work involves exploiting text data to identify changes at a granular level and capture nuanced patterns in firms’ technological and commercial positioning. Overall, the position contributes to quantitative evidence on how autonomy strategies, reshoring, and renewed interstate rivalry are reshaping firms and industries.