UPF Department of Economics and Business Professor Giacomo Ponzetto has been awarded a 2016 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. ERC Starting Grants are designed to encourage young talented research leader to gain independence in Europe and to build their own careers, and can be as high as €1.5 million and last for up to 5 years. The grants target promising researchers who have the proven potential of becoming independent research leaders.

Prof. Ponzetto is one of 325 European researchers selected out of the 2,935 applications for 2016 granting. The funding will allow Prof. Ponzetto to work on his project, entitled Citizens, Institutions and Globalization, which will focus on the interactions that occur between citizenship, political participation, the politics of institutions, and globalisation. Researchers will study the conditions that democratically provide support to trade and the policies that enhance productivity, as well as when and why voters support certain economic and social policies, and how governance architecture should react towards globalisation.

ERC Starting Grants enable researchers to build their teams and engage with postdocs and PhD students as ERC team members, therefore contributing to and supporting a new generation of top researchers in Europe. ERC-supported projects must fall within one of 25 panels split between three disciplinary domains. Prof. Ponzetto's project was selected for award under the ERC panel "Individuals, Markets and Organisations" within the Social Sciences and Humanities domain.

Prof. Ponzetto is a researcher at the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI), as well as a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow. He is involved in the UPF GPEFM master's and PhD programmes, and has published several working papers in 2016. Besides this, Prof. Ponzetto is also affiliated with the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (GSE).