Alberto Martín, a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in International Economics (CREI), a UPF professor of the Department of Economics and Business and a research professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) received the Taula de Canvi Award from the Catalan Economic Society (SCE).

The award ceremony of this first edition of the distinction took place on 11 April, in the afternoon, in the Prat de la Riba room of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC). Ada Ferrer i Carbonell, president of the Catalan Economic Society, who presented the award to Alberto Martín, welcomes those in attendance.

“I am extremely proud and grateful to the Catalan Economic Society for this recognition. It is always nice when your work is acknowledged, but in this case I am especially proud because of the high academic quality of the panel”, asserted Alberto Martín, an expert in macroeconomic theory, international economics and financial markets.

Alberto Martín: "It is always nice when your work is acknowledged, but in this case I am especially proud because of the high academic quality of the panel”

The panel of the award, which reached a unanimous decision, consisted of the economists Andreu Mas-Colell (chair), Pol Antràs, Inés Macho-Stadler, Marta Reynal-Querol, Jaume Ventura and  Xavier Vives, renowned researchers chosen by the SCE Board of Governors, with Joaquim Perramon, secretary-treasurer of the SCE, acting as secretary without a right to vote.

The event also included a speech by Pere Verdés Pijuan, a PhD in Medieval History and a researcher at the IMF-CSIC, in which he spoke about the origins of Taula de Canvi, the first public bank in Europe; and the reading of the minutes of the panel, by Elisenda Paluzie, SCE secretary-treasurer.

Lecture by Alberto Martín on bubbles and debt crises

Having received the award, Alberto Martín gave the lecture “Macroeconomics in times of low interest rates: bubbles, debt, and resource misallocation”.

In his presentation, professor Martin reviewed the main outcomes of his research on bubbles and debt crises. A central thread of his presentation is that we live in a bubble-prone world, with repeated episodes of rising and falling in asset prices (properties, shares) in multiple countries.

One of the factors that has contributed to this area is financial globalization, which has integrated global financial markets in many countries with high growth and high savings, but without the ability to generate assets.

This means that there is a high global demand for assets, which has led to a fall in the global interest rate and has opened the door to the existence of bubbles. “Bubbles create wealth and tend to generate capital inflows in the countries where they occur, but they can also lead to major crises and capital outflows when they burst”, said Alberto Martín.

The biennial Taula de Canvi Award, endowed with 5,000 euros and a commemorative piece of artwork, will, from now on, following a decision by the Board, be awarded annually. It is granted to a researcher aged under fifty years linked to a university or research centre of the Catalan linguistic domain in recognition of their scientific contribution to any of the areas of the economy.