ERC grants

This project plans to study the political economy frictions behind financial regulation in Africa. Combining bank balance sheets and information on bank chief executive officers (CEOs), we will measure the ethnic connotation of banks and the co-ethnicity between CEOs and regulators.

The goal of this proposal is to advance the research frontier on expectations formation and their economic impact. The proposal consists of three related projects that, through the provision of novel empirical evidence and the design of a new theoretical framework, can guide future research and better inform policy decisions.

The project investigates how monopsony power, where employers hold significant market power over labor, contributes to increasing wage inequalities and other labor market inefficiencies. It aims to understand the sources of monopsony power, which can include anti-competitive labor practices such as "no-compete" agreements, as well as cognitive biases affecting workers' decisions to leave low-paying jobs. It also aims to assess how these factors affect various socio-economic groups within the workforce. 

This project builds on the psychology of memory to study how selective retrieval affects economic decisions by shaping beliefs and preferences.

Many financial assets trade in decentralized over-the-counter (OTC) markets, that is, there is no centralized marketplace and investors need to search for counterparties that are willing to trade.

The project develops foundational tools in the organizational economics, given the uncertainty shrouding even the most promising research projects, information plays a key role in the organization of science.

The over-arching goal of this ERC Starting grant is to study the extremely important phenomena that link education and governments' policies through the lenses of quantitative economic history.

This research proposal describes three projects that will advance the frontier of our understanding of the working of digital markets. It is motivated by the consideration that the lack of a comprehensive empirical assessment of the crucial phenomena in this area driven by the lack of data availability has been the major impediment to the research in this area.

Why are populist parties more successful in some places (or times) compared to others? What makes right or left populism more prominent in some countries (or after certain crises)? This ERC Starting grant tackles these questions with the tools of behavioral political economy.

This ERC Advanced grant aims at explaining behavioral phenomena linked to the diffusion of nationalism and of political populism, trying to explain why it is so difficult to achieve further European political integration.