Léa Marchal

Léa Marchal is an Assistant Professor at Pantheon-Sorbonne University and a Fellow at the Kiel Centre for Globalization. She is affiliated with the Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne, housed in the Maison des Sciences Économiques in Paris, France. Her research focuses on international trade, migration economics, and the integration of immigrant workers into global value chains.

Her academic journey includes post-doctoral research positions at Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. She has conducted research visits at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris, reflecting her deep engagement with migration studies.

Léa Marchal's research interests span International Trade and Heterogeneous Firms, International Migration, and Micro-economics. Her work particularly examines how immigrant workers influence firm export performance and native wages. She has coordinated significant research projects, including How Immigration Impacts Natives' Wages: Investigating Cross-Country Differences, jointly funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) for 2018-2021.

Her publications reveal consistent themes in labor economics, international trade, and development economics. She employs microeconomic data and sophisticated econometric methods to examine causal relationships in migration and trade phenomena. Her meta-analysis of 42 studies found generally negligible effects of immigration on native wages, while her firm-level research demonstrated that foreign-born workers enhance export performance through both general productivity gains and destination-specific knowledge.

• German Federal Ministry of Finance research project on FDI and current account balance (2017-2018)
• ANR-DFG funded project on cross-country immigration wage effects (2018-2021)
• Research on French firm-level data showing German acquisitions have no negative impact on productivity

As a Fellow at the Kiel Centre for Globalization, Marchal contributes to understanding how immigrant workers integrate into global value chains and how this integration affects firm performance and labor markets. Her work combines theoretical frameworks of heterogeneous firms with empirical analysis of real-world data to provide actionable insights for economic policy.