ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to Prof. Libertad González and Prof. Gaël Le Mens
ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to Prof. Libertad González and Prof. Gaël Le Mens
The UPF Department of Economics and Business is pleased to announce that two professors have been awarded prestigious Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). Prof. Libertad González and Prof. Gaël Le Mens were each selected to receive European Union Horizon 2020 funding to carry out five-year Social Sciences and Humanities research projects starting in 2018.
Prof. González will conduct a project titled "The Causal Effect of Public Policy and Income on Child Health and Human Capita". The research project was awarded with €1.4 million and will study public policy shocks and impacts, particularly focusing on child development and the formative years between infancy and adulthood.
The study will consider impacts on: material resources of the home; time devoted by the father; medical treatment; availability of family planning services; and the aggregated impacts of demand in different economic sectors. Prof. González has conducted previous research on topics such as the economic effects of public policy on fertility, female labour supply, child health, and immigration.
Prof. Le Mens will conduct a project titled "The Implications of Selective Information Sampling for Individual and Collective Judgments". His grant award of €1.16 million will be put towards studying the mechanisms that lead to the polarisation of attitudes in social groups. The work will aim to predict the mechanisms of collective decision-making and to explain the role of social networks in providing information.
Prof. Le Mens' research interests focus on learning and social dynamics processes, exploring how individuals might develop and maintain inaccurate beliefs by relying on biased samples. His project was highlighted by an ERC news piece about the 2017 Consolidator Grants.
Out of the 2,538 applicants from this year's call, the ERC only issued 329 Consolidator Grants across Europe, all of which will last from 2018-2023. Besides Profs. González and Le Mens, there are 12 other professors from the UPF Department of Economics and Business currently conducting long-term research with support from ERC granting.
ERC Consolidator Grants are highly competitive and awarded to talented researchers with 7-12 years of experience who want to establish their research teams and continue developing a successful career. Grant proposals are evaluated by selected international peer reviewers on the basis of excellence as the sole criterion. ERC grants are indicative of world-class research across all academic disciplines.
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