Gianmarco León-Ciliotta, a Ramón y Cajal researcher with the UPF Department of Economics and Business, has recently obtained a Leonardo grant, as part of the 2022 edition of the Leonardo Grants for Researchers and Cultural Creators awarded by the BBVA Foundation.

Gianmarco León-Ciliotta: “It will be the first assessment of a programme of such characteristics for a developed country” 

The UPF researcher, also affiliated to the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) and the IPEG, is to carry out the project “The Universal Basic Wage: individual and aggregate effects of a public policy experiment”, which has been chosen within the economics, social sciences and law category of the call.

In 2023, Catalonia will launch a Universal Basic Wage (RBU) Pilot Plan with a duration of two years. Various citizens will receive a fixed monthly transfer, regardless of their income level or employment status.

To generate scientific evidence to on which to base the design of public policies, the evaluation of the pilot plan will use experimental methodologies to study causal effects at the individual level and those of general equilibrium on labour supply and demand and the use of public services.

The evaluation will be carried out by the Catalan Institute of Evaluation of Public Policies (Ivàlua) in collaboration with professor León-Ciliotta. “It will be the first assessment of a programme of such characteristics for a developed country” and “a milestone in the evaluation of public policies before their implementation”, states the UPF Ramón y Cajal researcher.

Expert in political, organizational and development economics

Gianmarco León-Ciliotta (Lima, Peru, 1980), a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (United States), has worked at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and has published in journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal, American Journal of Political Science, among others.

For his research, which focuses on political, organizational and development economics, he uses observational data and field experiments to study issues related to the selection and incentives of public sector workers, and selection in politics, exploring how different accountability institutions affect public policy.

A regular speaker at universities in Europe, the United States and Latin America, his projects have attracted funds from the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the J-PAL of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Grants for researchers working at an intermediate stage of their career

The Leonardo Grants are intended to support personal projects of researchers and cultural creators at intermediate stages of their career, aged between 30 and 45 years, who are notable for their significant scientific, technological or cultural production.

The grants, each of them endowed with up to 40,000 euros, can be developed over a period of between 12 and 18 months. In this 2022 call, a total of 884 applications were received of which 60 were selected, divided into nine categories: Basic Sciences; Mathematics; Biology and Biomedicine; Environmental and Earth Sciences; Information Engineering and Technologies; Economics, Social and Legal Sciences; Humanities; Music and Opera; and Literary Creation and the Performing Arts.