Three New ERC Grants to Bocconi

Thanks to the signing of two grant agreements and the transfer of a grant which followed the principal investigator, Nicola Gennaioli (Department of Finance), from Barcelona to Milan, in 2012 Bocconi enlarged its portfolio of European Research Council (ERC) grants managed as host institution, lifting it to 12.

Gennaioli's project, Institutions and Globalization (INST&GLOB) investigates how the quality of a country's national institutions affects its gains from international integration and how international integration affects a country's institutional reform path. A five-year project, INST&GLOB will go on until the end of August 2014.

The bulk of the grants hosted at Bocconi are in the panel SH1 – Individuals, Institutions and Markets: Economics, Finance and Management, with the exceptions of a grant in the Demography panel and one in Economic History. Bocconi enters the top tier of universities which host at least 10 ERC grants in the panel SH1, which included just University College London as of November 2012.

Fabrizio Perri (Department of Economics) is the principal investigator of Rethinking Sources and Consequences of Business Cycles (RESOCONBUCY), a project started on December 1, 2012, which received a € 1.1 million grant. Perri highlights that conventional economic wisdom explaining business cycles with a combination of technology and monetary factors and considering them a minor concern for developed countries has been hit hard by the 2007-2009 crisis, which was ignited by other factors and left profound scars on developed economies. The goal of the project is to better understand causes and consequences of the crisis, taking six distinct research paths.

The last project recipient of a grant is Pierpaolo Battigalli's (Department of Economics) Reasoning About Strategic Interaction and Emotions (STRATEMOTIONS). Battigalli proposes to develop a general framework to analyse the dynamics of social and economic interaction between intelligent agents, who may nonetheless be affected by their emotions and exhibit time inconsistent preferences. A crucial aspect of the analysis is modelling how agents form and change their beliefs about the environment and about each other, including beliefs about beliefs. The project, funded with € 1.2 million, will start in March.

The three professors are fellows of Bocconi's Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER) and their grants are managed at IGIER.