Back Miguel Espinosa awarded Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for research on knowledge workers

Miguel Espinosa awarded Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for research on knowledge workers

Funding is granted from the European Commission to undertake a two-year project studying specialisation in the knowledge economy
01.03.2018

 

Miguel Espinosa

UPF Department of Economics and Business professor Miguel Espinosa has been awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for a multidisciplinary research project on how human capital affects the organisation of companies and economies. Individual Fellowships enable experienced researchers to undertake their own research project at an organisation of their choice in a country different from the one where they received their PhD degree.

Prof. Espinosa was awarded in the Economics Sciences category, for which only 26 fellowships were granted this year by the European Commission out of a total of 1,348. His project, titled "SPIKE: Specialisation in the Knowledge Economy", will be a two-year investigation on the determinants of productivity and governance in the knowledge-based economy.

In some service industries, productivity depends more on social capital — the connections, or who knows who. In other industries, these skills are less relevant, while the human capital – the knowledge, or who knows what – plays a central role. The aim of the SPIKE project is to advance understanding of how human and social capitals affect the organisation of firms, with the goal of providing insights into the determinants of productivity and governance and to enhance growth in the knowledge economy.

Activities under the project will cross into aspects of organisational economics and political economy, and will be carried out in three parts. The first part will deal with the relationships between pressure groups and lobbyists, where Prof. Espinosa will collect new data and propose a theoretical model to guide the empirical patterns. The second will study the consequences of the differences in human capital resulting from specialisation by fields of knowledge. Besides extending the theoretical models of the knowledge-hierarchies paradigm, the project will use machine learning algorithms to analyse communication flows for a company. Finally, the third part of the project will consider whether employees' productivity in service companies is better explained with the knowledge of their clients or of their occupations. For that, newly collected data will be analysed.

The subject of the knowledge economy is related to other work by Prof. Espinosa, including two essays on the organisational economics of the lobbying market: "Technological Change and the Boundaries of the Firm: The Case of Lobbyists" and "Market Concentration and Lobbying Expenditures". Prof. Espinosa was also recently awarded the Young Economist Prize for his research on vertical integration of knowledge workers.

Prof Espinosa joins the list of Marie Curie awarded professors that also includes Isaac Baley in 2016, Davide Debortoli in 2015, and Julian Di Giovanni and Christian Michel in 2014.

Find out more about Prof. Espinosa via his personal website: Miguel Espinosa

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