The BBVA Foundation has recently awarded 58 grants to researchers and creators, within the framework of the 2024 call for Leonardo Scholarships, including two professors from the UPF Department of Economics and Business: Rosa Ferrer, a Serra Húnter associate professor, and Joan Monràs, a full professor, both also linked to the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE).

The grant obtained, with a duration of between 12 and 18 months and an endowment of some 40,000 euros, will allow them to conduct their highly innovative research projects, in both cases within the field of Economics (one of the ten fields to which the scholarships are allocated).

Rosa Ferrer will be the principal investigator of “New Tools to Estimate the Demand and Supply of Video Content: Heterogeneous Consumers, Gender, and Social Media Effects”, and Joan Monràs will be leading the project “Investigating the Implications of the Demand for Housing for Welfare Inequality”.

Which factors influence supply and demand in the audiovisual market?

Currently, people spend a significant amount of their free time watching video content, either on television or on the Internet. However, there are many factors that affect the audiovisual content consumed. Rosa Ferrer’s project will develop an empirical strategy to quantify the supply and demand forces affecting this market. “Beyond the standard explanatory variables, such as viewers’ socio-demographic variables and the type of content, I will analyse other factors, such as viewers’ aversion to ads and content with gender stereotypes”, the researcher points out.

Rosa Ferrer will develop an empirical strategy to quantify the supply and demand forces affecting this market

Also, taking advantage of the fact that television and social networks are commonly consumed as complementary products (that is, viewers frequently comment on content through social networks while watching programmes), the project will also help initiate a new line of research to determine the content characteristics that can be linked to subsequent undesirable behaviour on the internet, such as harassment and hate speech on social networks. In this sense, Rosa Ferrer will take advantage of the fact that platforms must facilitate access by researchers to key data on harassment on social networks.

Rosa Ferrer, a PhD in Economics from Vanderbilt University (USA), is a Serra Húnter assistant professor with the UPF Department of Economics and Business, an affiliated professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (where she directs the Master’s Program in Competition, Regulation, and Markets) and an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in Paris. Her work, in which she uses both empirical and applied theory to analyse social and legal problems, currently focuses on the regulation of consumption and gender differences, the digital economy, behaviour and consumer regulatory policy.

How does the proportion of spending on housing affect welfare inequalities?

The conventional view among macroeconomists studying real estate markets is that the proportion of spending allocated to housing is fairly constant (on average) across metropolitan areas. This leads them, in their models, to assume equal proportions of housing expenditure between households of different incomes studying phenomena such as changes in the labour and housing markets.

In his project, Joan Monràs will challenge this vision: “My main argument is that the proportion of income spent on housing is lower among the richest households than among the poorest. This could play a key role in studying the implications on welfare of changes in both the labour and real estate markets”, he asserts.

Joan Monràs belives that uniform improvements in labour market conditions benefit the richest households more than the poorest

For example, Joan Monràs believes that increases in house prices may lead to increases in welfare inequality when expenditure on housing is higher for poor than for rich households. Also, that uniform improvements in labour market conditions benefit the richest households more than the poorest, taking into account that increases in wages raise the demand for housing, and greater competition in the real estate market harms poor households disproportionately.

Joan Monràs, a PhD in Economics from the University of Columbia (USA), is a full professor at the UPF Department of Economics and Business, a research associate at the Centre for Research in International Economics (CREI) and an affiliated professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). In recent years, he has taken leave of absence to hold the position of research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (USA). His research, within the fields of labour economics, urban economics and international trade, focuses on understanding labour mobility, especially geographical, and how this contributes to spatial balance. One of his lines of work analyses the effects of immigration on the labour market.

Leonardo Scholarships, a highly competitive call supporting innovative projects

The 2024 edition of the BBVA Foundation’s Leonardo Scholarships has selected 58 projects from the 1,423 applications submitted, a success rate of 4%, which is indicative of the call’s high degree of competitiveness. They are individual projects, conducted by people who are at a decisive moment in their professional careers: researchers and creators aged between 30 and 45 years, at an intermediate stage of their careers.

The ten areas included in the call are Basic Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics); Biology and Biomedicine; Environmental and Earth Sciences; Engineering; Computer Science and Data Science; Social Sciences; Humanities; Fine Arts; Music and Opera; Literary Creation and Performing Arts.