Projects

Current projects | Past projects

INSIDE Project (Insights on Immigration and Development)
http://www.inside.org.es/
INSIDE is an independent, non-partisan initiative launched by the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE, CSIC). We aim at mobilizing and coordinating the research community contributing to the understanding of the causes and consequences of migrations. Special emphasis is also placed on the study of key aspects of economic development and growth of poor countries.

Our mission is to promote research and coordinate the efforts from researchers belonging to different institutions in view to contribute to the public debate on immigration and development issues.

Our interests include macro and microeconomic research, theory and empirics. We are committed to high standards of research.

"Dynamic Modeling of Labor Market Mobility and Human Capital Accumulation" (DYMOLAMO)
HORIZON ERC-2018-STG- GA 804989,
2018-2025
Coordinator: Joan Llull (IAE-CSIC), Beneficiary partners: Barcelona School of Economics (BSE)

In today’s globalized world, labor mobility is at the core of the political debate and a centerpiece for economic policy. The design of efficient migration policies requires a good understanding of a very fundamental issue: understanding the role of internal migration and immigration in shaping the career paths and human capital accumulation of workers. The project DYMOLAMO aims at providing a coherent analysis that allows us to understand the interactions between labor mobility and human capital accumulation, and their implications for economic policy design. DYMOLAMO focuses on three main issues: labor mobility, labor market effects of immigration, and the interaction between the two. In particular, it focuses on the following questions: (a) What are the role of temporary and permanent contracts in shaping career paths and geographic mobility of workers? (b) Does the forgone human capital accumulation during a recession produce a lost generation? Is this alleviated by geographical mobility? (c) What is the role of geographical and occupational mobility in spreading or containing the effects of technological progress on wage inequality? (d) To what extent selective immigration policies maximize native workers’ prospects and wellbeing? (e) How can we increase the degree of assimilation of immigrants? To address them, DYMOLAMO develops dynamic equilibrium models that explicitly characterize human capital accumulation decisions of workers and how these decisions interact with migration, and develops novel estimation methods for them. The estimated models are used to evaluate and design key economic policies for the labor market.

"Inequalities: the Crossroad of Labor, Education, and Finacial Markets"
PDI2019-108144GB-100, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2020-2024
Hugo Rodríguez, Ana Rute Cardoso, David Card, Paulo Guimaraes, Jose Jorge, Marta Lopes, Lous-Philippe Morin, David Rivero, Hugo Reis, Pedro Luis Silva, Jose Varejao

The initial alarm over a jobless world driven by robotization and digitalization has been displaced by concerns over the quality of jobs and their distribution among the population in working age (OECD 2019; Acemoglu and Restrepo 2018; Autor 2015). Indeed, technological progress has been redistributing the job and career opportunities in favor of workers with high levels of human capital in certain occupations, industries, and firms. Conversely, low pay, underemployment, unemployment or inactivity are concentrated in the young, the females, the low-educated, certain regions and industries. There is also concern over the rising share of national incomes going to capital to the detriment of labor. Therefore, there is widespread call for sustained investment in human capital, on the one hand, and better institutions to promote a more equitable access to resources, on the other hand.
This project focuses on the drivers of inequality in the labor market and their links to the tertiary education system and the financial market. It devotes particular attention to youngsters and females � their initial transition into the labor market and subsequent career progression. Throughout the project, we consider two-sided markets, mediated by institutions. For example, in the labor market, we analyze the interaction between workers' and firms' decisions, under collective bargaining and government regulations on minimum wages and worktime. In the education system, we analyze the interaction between the decisions of students and degree-awarding institutions, under a centralized student allocation system run by the government. In the financial market, we first analyze the impact of liquidity constraints on decisions by students and by firms, and subsequently model the decisions on credit production by banks, under the constraints imposed by the central banks.

"Matching markets, experimental economics, and subjective well-being"
PID2020-114251GB-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2021-2024
Flip Klijn, Jordi Brandts, Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Q. Liu, P. Biró, D. Cooper, J. Costa-Font, E. Fatas, K. Gerxhani, H. Hamers, B. Klaus, K. Klimentova, C. López, Ch. Rott, S. Pápai, A. Schram, M. Slikk

This project is structured along three lines of research in microeconomics. All three lines have been developed strongly in recent years by international groups of researchers, including the members of the current research proposal. The first research line consists of a number of theoretical and experimental studies on various aspects of matching markets and allocation problems. The second research line consists of experimental studies on a number of applied issues. And finally, the third research line consists of a set of empirical studies that aim at contributing to a better understanding of individuals’ welfare, preferences and behavior, as well as its implications for policy making.

"Cooperation, coordination and loyalty: new developments in microeconomic theory"
PID2020-118653GB-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2021-2024
Matthew Ellman, Ramon Caminal, Faruk Yasar, Roberto Burguet

This project will use tools from the field of microeconomics to develop new strategies for modeling cooperation, coordination and loyalty, in the digital economy and beyond. The project adopts a largely theoretical viewpoint but will test some of the ideas via a series of laboratory experiments and empirical analysis using real world data. The main applications include crowdfunding, where funders want to coordinate to invest in good projects and avoid wasted inspection costs, coalitions where members need to take account of externalities from and on other groups, coordination platforms that empower people to stand up for their rights, loyalty where firms seek to maintain customer loyalty but are unable to commit fully to the terms they want to promise.

"Institutional and Policy Design to Enhance Social Welfare (INPODE)"
PID2021-126200NB-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2022 - 2025
Enriqueta Aragonès, Esther Hauk, Alexander Krauss, Aidt Toke, Facundo Albornoz, Dmitrios Xefteris

The objective of this project is to analyze different political institutions according to their social and economic effects on the society. Its ultimate goal is to contribute to the innovative design of social and political institutions. With this aim we have structured the contents of the project in three main research lines:
1) What drives major breakthroughs in economics?
Major breakthroughs in economic research have had an important impact on our lives by shaping public policies. What conditions drive the major advances in the field of economics? We will assess which determinants of ground-breaking economic research are most important.
2) Political institutions
We analyze open issues on foreign influence in domestic policies and we analyze the role of leaders in magnifying the polarization of the society views through social networks in the context of coordination games.
3) Introducing female values in decision making.
This project proposes a theoretical approach to analyze different arguments about the reasons why a world in which males and females are found in equal shares in all professions and at all levels may be optimal.

"Common Ownership, Sustainability and Decentralized Finance"
PID2021-128430NB-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2022-2025
Sjaak Hurkens, Ángel López

We propose two lines of research. In the first line we are interested in analyzing (i) the endogenous formation of common ownership structures, (ii) how common ownership affects the determination of the sequence of competition and the incentives for firms to adopt new technologies, and (iii) how different overlapping ownership structures in, on the one hand, producing companies that negatively affect the climate and the environment, and, on the other hand, companies that
rely on a protected climate and clean environments, affect the objectives and incentives of both industries and thereby affects sustainability. In the second line of research, we focus on the impact
of blockchain technologies on markets and finance, and on the recent uprise of new ways of financing companies and startups, by-passing standard institutions as venture capitalists and (central) banks. We are interested in decentralized finance as in investment-based crowdfunding, where many small investors finance a company or project, and also in cryptocurrencies (and blockchain technologies), where many so-called miners or validators (under proof of stake consensus algorithm) certify transactions and compete with traditional banks and registries.

"Resilient Societies: Poverty, Climate and Conflict"
PID2021-124256OB-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
2022-2025
Laura Mayoral, Hannes Mueller, Joan M. Esteban, Stefano Falcone, Jaume Freire (Equipo Investigación) Andrea Canidio, Bruno Conte, Stefano Falcone, Thiemo Fetzer, Sophie Hatte, John Huber, Debraj Ray, Salif Jaiteh Benhamouche Zoubir

As societies around the world become more interconnected and globalized, hazards are and will be increasingly shared across the globe, and thus, will become more and more frequent. A resilient society is one that, after being exposed to hazards, is able to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt, and bounce back from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner. Our departure point is that making societies more resilient should start with understanding economic exclusion, which in turn contributes to political instability and conflict. Thus, poverty, economic inequality, and political instability are seen as some of the main obstacles to achieving resilient societies.

To deepen our understanding of these issues, our research will be developed in two deeply interrelated areas. The first part of the analysis will identify who and where the most vulnerable individuals on the planet are located. To that effect, we will create two new datasets that will map with a high level of spatial resolution economic well-being, poverty and economic inequality on the one hand, and the degree of vulnerability of the population to climate change, on the other. The second major research line analyses social cleavages, their historical origins and persistence over time, as well as the existence of efficient institutions. Firstly, we will examine social cleavages along class and linguistic lines. Secondly, we will focus on the impact of technological progress. Finally, we'll examine the persistence of social cleavages and hence the eventual inability to design institutions that adapt to the new environments.

"Microeconomia Teòrica i Empírica"
2021 SGR 00415, Generalitat de Catalunya
2022-2025
Ramon Caminal, Jordi Brandts, Sjaak Hurkens, Matthew Ellman, Angel López, Ursula Mello, Katherina Thomas (predocc), Esther Hauk, Alexander Krauss.

Our research lies within the field of microeconomics, and we do both theory and empirics. Our goal is to contribute to the frontier academic research as well as to current debates on economic policy and regulation. An important part of the project focuses on industrial organization and organizational economics, with a special emphasis on platforms (including crowdfunding) and experimental methods. Other relevant lines of research include political economics, education economics, economics of science, and economics of languages.

"Social and Political Conflict (SoPoC)"
2021 SGR 00416, Generalitat de Catalunya
2022-2025
Ada Ferrer, Enriqueta Aragonès, Flip Klijn, , Laura Mayoral, Hannes Mueller, Joan Esteban, Boyao Zhang (predoc), Hugo Rodríguez, Jaume Freire, Stefano Falcone, Federica Braccioli

This research group focuses on social and political conflict issues. The research is based on both theory and empirics, using cutting-edge econometric and statistical analysis. We expect the project to contribute both to the scientific knowledge and the policy debate on pressing social issues. Combining our research lines will allow us to answer our research questions from various perspectives, enriching our contribution to the literature.

An important part of the project will study how the cultural, economic, environmental, and political factors influence social conflict and development. The project will also focus on the impact that the context of each individual has on their wellbeing and how this is also a source of conflict and social unrest. Finally, the project will focus on the behavior of participants and organization of markets as a way to understand how conflict evolves and what are the institutions that can promote the development of good functioning of the markets.

"Anticipating the Impact of Armed Conflict on Human Development" (ANTICIPATE)
HORIZON ERC-2021-ADG- 101055176,
2022-2027
Beneficiary partners: Hannes Mueller (IP) IAE-CSIC and ISDC, Coordinator: Havard Hegre (PI)-PRIO Oslo
https://www.prio.org/projects/1976
Armed conflict is human development in reverse. The full scale of conflicts’ impacts remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding. This multidisciplinary project brings together scholars from economics, epidemiology, political science, and conflict research to study the impacts in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies. It takes a risk analysis perspective, assessing the expected impact as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and consider effects at both the macro and micro level, on economies, health, and political institutions. It will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of observed, overt violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time, identify conditions that make local communities, marginalized groups, and women particularly vulnerable to the effects, and study how conflict increases their vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters. The objective of the project is to model hazard as a probability distribution over the predicted number of direct deaths from violence in locations across the world, exposure as a model for how local populations will be affected by this likely violence, and vulnerability how exposure is translated into adverse human development impact for these populations. The results will be coordinated in the form of a monthly updated early-warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS model, to also alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence. Throughout, the project will study how the various impacts and vulnerabilities identified work to reinforce each other, and formulate policy recommendations for parties seeking to reduce the impact on human development.

"Artificial inteLLigence In sustainable dEvelopment goals" (ALLIES)
HORIZON -MSCA-2022-COFUND 01,
2024-2028
Hannes Mueller PI IAE-CSIC, Coordinator: IIIA-CSIC
https://aihub.csic.es/en/allies-cofund/
ALLIES (“Artificial inteLLigence In sustainable dEvelopment goalS”) is a new excellent collaborative postdoctoral programme led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and coordinated through the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) for the recruitment of 17 postdoctoral researchers to provide a new dimension through highly interdisciplinary & intersectoral research in the broad topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in alignment with the SDGs while maintaining the highest research quality standards. The programme includes the participation of 18 different CSIC research institutes expert in the fields of AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, Robotics & Data Science as Implementing organisations recruiting fellows.

In addition to offering a bottom-up approach for multidisciplinary research topics in one of the 8 AI challenges covered in CSIC’s AI White Paper, the programme provides a tailor-made training programme to educate tomorrow’s AI researchers & entrepreneurs in a broad set of scientific, transferable, and business skills. ALLIES builds up on the Artificial Intelligence Hub (AIHUB) collaborative framework created by CSIC to provide an excellence platform to pursue and fulfil the strategic agenda of CSIC in AI, in alignment with national and european strategies and policies. Indeed, one of the medium-term impacts and outcomes of ALLIES is to create a workflow of excellent researchers as future leaders in AI for the implementation of CSIC’s scientific challenges in AI, robotics & data science as well as the EC White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and other relevant national and European strategies and priorities. The programme will maximise the impact on the career perspectives of recruited fellows by integrating a holistic approach to training through a combination of research-oriented and soft skills, providing the recruited fellows with personal capacities and prospective career perspectives in the academic & non-academic sectors.