News  

16/11/2010

ERC Starting Grants for Professors Fernando Broner and Nezih Guner

Barcelona GSE affiliated professors Fernando Broner (CREI and Barcelona GSE) and Nezih Guner (ICREA-MOVE, UAB, and Barcelona GSE) have been chosen to receive the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants. These highly competitive grants are awarded to support frontier research by early-career research leaders on the basis of excellence, as determined by a panel of scientific peers, and they have quickly become indicators of world-class research across all academic disciplines.

The GSE affiliated faculty now includes six ERC Starting Grant recipients, in addition to three ERC Advanced Grant recipients, which provide funding for cutting-edge research by the very best established research leaders in Europe.

Professors Broner and Guner will use their Starting Grants for the following research projects:

"International Capital Flows and Emerging Markets"

Prof. Fernando Broner (CREI and Barcelona GSE)

Financial liberalization in emerging markets has not produced the benefits predicted by conventional, neoclassical growth models. There is broad consensus that in real economies financial frictions must play a much larger role than these models anticipated. The objective of Prof. Broner's research project is to enhance our understanding of how this happens, emphasizing the interactions between financial integration and the workings of domestic financial markets.

"Changing Families: Causes, Consequences and Challenges for Public Policy"

Prof. Nezih Guner (ICREA-MOVE, UAB, and Barcelona GSE)

Barcelona GSE Research Professor

The household and family structure in every major industrialized country changed in a fundamental way during the last couple of decades. First, marriage is less important today, as divorce, cohabitation, and single-motherhood are much more common. Second, female labor force participation has increased dramatically. As a result of these changes, today’s households are very far from traditional breadwinner husband and housekeeper wife paradigm. These dramatic changes generated significant public interest and a large body of literature that tries to understand causes and consequences of these changes. Prof. Guner's research will look to improve the general understanding of income risk, the role of social insurance policies, and labor market dynamics by building models that explicitly consider two-earner households.