The ERC (European Research Council), set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.
Minimum wages and taxes and transfers are the primary policy tools to boost incomes for the working poor. However, despite their pervasive adoption and extensive research on them, we still face important unanswered questions. Is having a minimum wage at all justified when governments can redistribute with taxes?
The BALANCE project (Firms' Social Impact: Balancing Profits and Externalities) investigates how corporations navigate the trade-off between profit maximization and their impact on society and the environment.
The over-arching goal of STATE-DEV is to advance our understanding of the development of state capacity, with particular emphasis on three essential pillars: 1) the drivers of demand for state capacity; 2) the quality of the state's bureaucracy, a crucial element of the supply side of state capacity; 3) the institutional elements that facilitate or hinder corruption in the operations of the state.
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.