Pompeu Fabra University have obtained three Consolidator grants from the European Research Council (ERC). This type of grant is intended to support researchers who are at the stage where they are consolidating their own independent research team or research programme.

Marta Reynal-Querol and José Luis Peydró, ICREA researchers of the Department of Economics and Business, and Serena Olsaretti, ICREA researcher of the Department of Humanities, will be able to lead their respective research groups according to each of the lines of research they are pursuing at Pompeu Fabra University.

Marta Reynal-Querol will form a team of researchers to study the historical roots of conflicts and development: " Historical Roots of Conflict and Development: From Prehistory to the Colonization Experience". In the words of the researcher, "I intend to study the effect of the history of conflicts and economic development with two moments in history". In her research, Reynal-Querol uses administrative data of the first colonists in Latin America and focuses on the study of human capital in economic development and conflict.

 At the start of colonization, the process of institutionalization was not the same across all the regions of Latin America and in many cases, the researcher has identified that they are an evolution of pre-Columbian institutions. In a second part of the project, "I intend to go further back in time to understand how very old conflicts influence current conflicts", the researcher states. In this phase of the project, regional archaeological evidence will be used to analyse the dynamics of conflict in Latin America in the long term.

Serena Olsaretti and her team are to carry out the research programme " Justice and the Family: An Analysis of the Normative Significance of Procreation and Parenthood in a Just Society".

Procreation and parenthood involve benefits and burdens for the parents, the children and society in general. The regulatory meaning of procreation and parenthood, from the perspective of the theory of justice is a crucial and necessary subject in any just society. This research programme seeks to develop a theoretical regulatory framework around this topic. As Olsaretti explained: "The general principles of justice address adult individuals and the institutions that they themselves constitute in society. However, theoretical justice has not been sufficiently questioned with regard to procreation and the care of offspring".  

In this context, the project seeks to identify and analyse three aspects related to justice and the family. Firstly, from the realm of distributive justice to analyse what is care of children by each parent; secondly, what are the requirements of justice for children, and finally, to study, from the point of view of theoretical justice, society's responsibility with a view to future generations, whether one is a parent or not.

With the ERC Consolidator grant José Luis Peydró will undertake the research project entitled " Debt and Persistence of Financial Shocks".

The project is based on the fact that financial crises involve negative periods, both with regard to production and employment, as compared to normal economic recessions, and a considerable length of time must pass in order to recover the economic levels of prior to the crisis. Financial crises are characterized by a credit boom before the crisis and subsequent negative global credit growth.

Peydró's project questions why the effects of the crisis are so persistent in time and, as he states, "its main goal, as compared to the existing literature, is to provide evidence of causality, quantification and analysis of public policies related to this issue and the interaction between the systemic risk, the crisis, macro-economics and the new macroprudential policies.