research
BSE Seed Grants help researchers get projects off the ground
Researchers at the Barcelona School of Economics are now reporting some of their preliminary results from the projects supported by BSE Seed Grants. The Seed Grants are supported by the BSE's Severo Ochoa Research Excellence Accreditation.
All BSE Affiliated Professors can submit a proposal to the annual call for the grants. In the first three calls, 42 seed grants have been awarded for projects on topics across Applied Economics, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics.
“True to its intention, I have been able to sow the seeds of what I believe will turn out to be a very interesting and promising research project,” said Prof. Albrecht Glitz (UPF and BSE). Professor Glitz is using a seed grant for his project “Why spy?” in which he is analyzing the individual determinants of industrial and political espionage activities of Stasi informants.
Seed grants facilitate research activities and sometimes lead to larger grants
Seed grant funds have been used to conduct fieldwork, lab experiments, and surveys; to finance co-author visits and travel to conferences; to purchase datasets; and to hire research assistants.
For their project, “Investigating constraints on informal risk-sharing theoretically and empirically”, Pau Milán (UAB-MOVE and BSE) and Raül Santaeulàlia (UAB and BSE) traveled to Malawi where they interviewed all households (guanyu) in one selected village in Balaka and tracked food and resource exchanges across all households of the village. Now back in Barcelona, they are currently matching households across reported transfers and are drafting their first network measures.
Maria Petrova (ICREA-IPEG, UPF and BSE) used her seed grant to conduct a pilot survey in the UK on corporal punishment. “I am grateful to BSE and Severo Ochoa grant for the opportunity to run a pilot survey, which is invaluable before running a large survey for [a grant from the European Research Council], which I got after starting pilot preparation.”
Seed Grant Highlights from the first three calls
ERC Grants building on BSE Seed Grant research
- Joan Llull (2018), "Dynamic Modeling of Labor Market Mobility and Human Capital Accumulation"
- Maria Petrova (2018), "The Rise and Fall of Populism and Extremism"
- Edouard Schaal (2018), "Optimal Transport Networks in Spatial Equilibrium"
- Ruben Durante (2017), "Independence and Quality of Mass Media in the Internet Age"
Watch videos about ERC Grants on BSE Focus
More international recognition for work produced from Seed Grants
- David K. Nagy received The Journal of Political Economy's Robert E. Lucas Jr. Prize for "The Geography of Development" (2019)
- “Disruptive Business Model Integration: Implications for the Established Business” (Mircea Epure and Timo Sohl) included in best paper proceedings of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Atlanta, USA (2017)
Some of the working papers generated by Seed Grant research teams
- Vladimir Asriyan et al. "Collateral Booms and Information Depletion" (WP1064)
- Larbi Alaoui and Antonio Penta. "Cost-Benefit Analysis in Reasoning" (WP1062)
- Antonio Miralles et al. "Fairness and Efficiency for Probabilistic Allocations with Endowments" (WP1055)
- Luca Fornaro and Federica Romei. "The Paradox of Global Thrift" (WP1039)
- Christopher Busch et. al. "Asymmetric Business-Cycle Risk and Social Insurance" (WP1031)
- Larbi Alaoui and Christian Fons-Rosen. "Know when to Fold 'em: The Grit Factor" (WP899)
Search Barcelona School of Economics Working Papers