Three New ERC Grants to Bocconi

Three Bocconi professors recently got prestigious ERC grants with a cumulative funding of around € 3 million. Nicola Gennaioli, Tommaso Nannicini and Delia Baldassarri are the awarded trio.

Gennaioli (Department of Finance and IGIER) plans to use his project SalThApp – Psychology and Economic Behavior: Theory, Tests and Applications to better understand investors' risk perceptions in financial markets, asset price behavior, salient policy issues, consumer attention, product design, and competition among firms.

Tommaso Nannicini, an associate professor in the Department of Economics and an IGIER fellow will instead turn in the direction of politicians and voters. With his "POLITICALMIND - Explaining Politicians' and Voters' Behavior" he will look at the role of political parties as organizational structures, and also at how the social preferences, personality traits, and cognitive biases shape the beliefs and the choices of politicians and voters.

Last but far from least is Delia Baldassarri, an associate professor at New York University and a member of the Bocconi Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. With her project "INTERACT - INTerEthnic Relationships in contemporAry CommuniTies: How does ethnoracial diversity affect in- and out-group trust, solidarity, and cooperation", she hopes to have an impact in public policy circles. Questions like, "Why does diversity lead to undesirable collective outcomes in the multiethnic societies we live in today?" grasp her attention. Baldassarri hopes to empirically re-assess the relationship between ethnoracial heterogeneity and various collective outcomes. As a second step, she will investigate the mechanisms through which contact promotes or impedes solidarity and cooperation in diverse groups.

"These grants are a recognition of the excellence of our faculty, who can successfully compete with the best European researchers", said Bocconi's Vice-Rector for Research, Eliana La Ferrara. "The ERC grants allow the principal investigators to undertake very ambitious projects. Finally, they give Bocconi great visibility on the European scene. This in turn helps us attract excellent students and international faculty". The merit for getting the grants does not only go to the Bocconi researchers. "Bocconi as an institution has also invested a lot in building an infrastructure at the Research Division to help our faculty prepare and administer these grants".