Project acronym BABE
Project Bodies across borders: oral and visual memory in Europe and beyond
Researcher (PI) Luisella Passerini
Host Institution (HI) EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2011-ADG_20110406
Summary This project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings.
Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa.
Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.
Summary
This project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings.
Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa.
Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.
Max ERC Funding
1 488 501 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31
Project acronym COBHAM
Project The role of consumer behavior and heterogeneity in the integrated assessment of energy and climate policies
Researcher (PI) Massimo Tavoni
Host Institution (HI) POLITECNICO DI MILANO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2013-StG
Summary The objective of this project is to quantify the role of consumers’ behaviour on the design and assessment of policies aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and conservation and at promoting climate change mitigation. The project brings together different disciplines –namely energy policy, environmental and ecological economics, behavioral public finance, experimental economics, and technology policy- in an integrated fashion. COBHAM is designed to go beyond the standard analysis of energy and climate policies in the presence of environmental externalities, by accounting for the heterogeneity in consumers’ preferences, the role of social interactions, and the presence of behavioral tendencies and biases. The project seeks to: i) carry out innovative research in the theoretical understanding of the interplay between behavioral tendencies and environmental externalities; ii) generate new empirical data and research on individual preferences by means of original surveys and controlled experiments; iii) enhance integrated assessment models (IAMs) of economy, energy and climate with an advanced representation of consumers’ behavior. In doing so, the project will be able to provide a richer characterization of energy demand and of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, to better estimate consumers’ responsiveness to energy and climate policies, and to provide input to the design of new policy instruments aimed at influencing energy and environmental sustainable behavior. COBHAM is of high public policy relevance given Europe’s legislation on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions, and can provide important insights also outside the sphere of energy and climate policymaking.
Summary
The objective of this project is to quantify the role of consumers’ behaviour on the design and assessment of policies aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and conservation and at promoting climate change mitigation. The project brings together different disciplines –namely energy policy, environmental and ecological economics, behavioral public finance, experimental economics, and technology policy- in an integrated fashion. COBHAM is designed to go beyond the standard analysis of energy and climate policies in the presence of environmental externalities, by accounting for the heterogeneity in consumers’ preferences, the role of social interactions, and the presence of behavioral tendencies and biases. The project seeks to: i) carry out innovative research in the theoretical understanding of the interplay between behavioral tendencies and environmental externalities; ii) generate new empirical data and research on individual preferences by means of original surveys and controlled experiments; iii) enhance integrated assessment models (IAMs) of economy, energy and climate with an advanced representation of consumers’ behavior. In doing so, the project will be able to provide a richer characterization of energy demand and of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, to better estimate consumers’ responsiveness to energy and climate policies, and to provide input to the design of new policy instruments aimed at influencing energy and environmental sustainable behavior. COBHAM is of high public policy relevance given Europe’s legislation on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions, and can provide important insights also outside the sphere of energy and climate policymaking.
Max ERC Funding
1 451 840 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-08-01, End date: 2019-07-31
Project acronym COMPOSES
Project Compositional Operations in Semantic Space
Researcher (PI) Marco Baroni
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI TRENTO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2011-StG_20101124
Summary The ability to construct new meanings by combining words into larger constituents is one of the fundamental and peculiarly human characteristics of language. Systems that induce the meaning and combinatorial properties of linguistic symbols from data are highly desirable both from a theoretical perspective (modeling a core aspect of cognition) and for practical purposes (supporting human-computer interaction). COMPOSES tackles the meaning induction and composition problem from a new perspective that brings together corpus-based distributional semantics (that is very successful at inducing the meaning of single content words, but ignores functional elements and compositionality) and formal semantics (that focuses on functional elements and composition, but largely ignores lexical aspects of meaning and lacks methods to learn the proposed structures from data). As in distributional semantics, we represent some content words (such as nouns) by vectors recording their corpus contexts. Implementing instead ideas from formal semantics, functional elements (such as determiners) are represented by functions mapping from expressions of one type onto composite expressions of the same or other types. These composition functions are induced from corpus data by statistical learning of mappings from observed context vectors of input arguments to observed context vectors of composite structures. We model a number of compositional processes in this way, developing a coherent fragment of the semantics of English in a data-driven, large-scale fashion. Given the novelty of the approach, we also propose new evaluation frameworks: On the one hand, we take inspiration from cognitive science and experimental linguistics to design elicitation methods measuring the perceived similarity and plausibility of sentences. On the other, specialized entailment tests will assess the semantic inference properties of our corpus-induced system.
Summary
The ability to construct new meanings by combining words into larger constituents is one of the fundamental and peculiarly human characteristics of language. Systems that induce the meaning and combinatorial properties of linguistic symbols from data are highly desirable both from a theoretical perspective (modeling a core aspect of cognition) and for practical purposes (supporting human-computer interaction). COMPOSES tackles the meaning induction and composition problem from a new perspective that brings together corpus-based distributional semantics (that is very successful at inducing the meaning of single content words, but ignores functional elements and compositionality) and formal semantics (that focuses on functional elements and composition, but largely ignores lexical aspects of meaning and lacks methods to learn the proposed structures from data). As in distributional semantics, we represent some content words (such as nouns) by vectors recording their corpus contexts. Implementing instead ideas from formal semantics, functional elements (such as determiners) are represented by functions mapping from expressions of one type onto composite expressions of the same or other types. These composition functions are induced from corpus data by statistical learning of mappings from observed context vectors of input arguments to observed context vectors of composite structures. We model a number of compositional processes in this way, developing a coherent fragment of the semantics of English in a data-driven, large-scale fashion. Given the novelty of the approach, we also propose new evaluation frameworks: On the one hand, we take inspiration from cognitive science and experimental linguistics to design elicitation methods measuring the perceived similarity and plausibility of sentences. On the other, specialized entailment tests will assess the semantic inference properties of our corpus-induced system.
Max ERC Funding
1 117 636 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2016-10-31
Project acronym CROME
Project Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times
Researcher (PI) Miguel Gonçalo CARDINA
Host Institution (HI) CENTRO DE ESTUDOS SOCIAIS
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2016-STG
Summary Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity.
CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories.
The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.
Summary
Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity.
CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories.
The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.
Max ERC Funding
1 478 249 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31
Project acronym DECIDE
Project The impact of DEmographic Changes on Infectious DisEases transmission and control in middle/low income countries
Researcher (PI) Alessia Melegaro
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2011-StG_20101124
Summary Population structure and change and social contact patterns are major determinants of the observed epidemiology of infectious diseases, including the consequences on health. Demographic structure and the components of demographic dynamics are changing over time and substantially differ within countries and most critically between countries. However, some of the overall consequences of demographic changes remain unclear, though urbanisation and fertility decline will certainly have a profound impact on social structures, family composition and, as a consequence, on disease spread and on the identification of effective public health measures.
DECIDE will explore the following questions:
1. What are the major short- and medium-term impacts of demographic changes on the patterns of infectious disease (morbidity and mortality)?
2. How are these demographic changes affecting contact patterns that are of fundamental importance to the spread of infectious diseases? Are there new and different modes of transmission within and between populations?
3. What are the implications of demographic changes for infection control strategies? What is the interplay between demographic changes and public health policies in shaping future trajectories of infectious diseases?
In order to answer these questions, DECIDE will use the following strategy: analyse harmonised demographic and health survey data (DHS), and health and demographic surveillance system data (HDSS); develop new estimates of social contact patterns and other socio-demographic variables collecting data from representative samples of both urban and rural settings in selected countries; develop a theoretical framework to predict the likely chains through which demographic change influences the burden of infectious diseases; develop and parameterise mathematical population models for the transmission of infectious diseases to evaluate the impact of public health measures under changing demographic conditions.
Summary
Population structure and change and social contact patterns are major determinants of the observed epidemiology of infectious diseases, including the consequences on health. Demographic structure and the components of demographic dynamics are changing over time and substantially differ within countries and most critically between countries. However, some of the overall consequences of demographic changes remain unclear, though urbanisation and fertility decline will certainly have a profound impact on social structures, family composition and, as a consequence, on disease spread and on the identification of effective public health measures.
DECIDE will explore the following questions:
1. What are the major short- and medium-term impacts of demographic changes on the patterns of infectious disease (morbidity and mortality)?
2. How are these demographic changes affecting contact patterns that are of fundamental importance to the spread of infectious diseases? Are there new and different modes of transmission within and between populations?
3. What are the implications of demographic changes for infection control strategies? What is the interplay between demographic changes and public health policies in shaping future trajectories of infectious diseases?
In order to answer these questions, DECIDE will use the following strategy: analyse harmonised demographic and health survey data (DHS), and health and demographic surveillance system data (HDSS); develop new estimates of social contact patterns and other socio-demographic variables collecting data from representative samples of both urban and rural settings in selected countries; develop a theoretical framework to predict the likely chains through which demographic change influences the burden of infectious diseases; develop and parameterise mathematical population models for the transmission of infectious diseases to evaluate the impact of public health measures under changing demographic conditions.
Max ERC Funding
1 210 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2017-12-31
Project acronym EarlyModernCosmology
Project Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe
Researcher (PI) Pietro Daniel OMODEO
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary The focus of this project is the competing confessional discourses on cosmology of the seventeenth century, an epoch in which religious conflicts originated opposing ‘epistemic cultures’, which were embodied in scholarly institutions and networks such as the Protestant web of northern European universities or the global web of Jesuit colleges.
In the Early Modern Period cosmological controversies (over issues such as heliocentrism, plurality of worlds, space, infinity, cometary theory, celestial matter and fluidity) were heated and amplified by increasing political and confessional fragmentation. The Roman prohibition of the Copernican system (1616) and the extraordinary condemnation of Galileo (1633) accelerated the formation of competing cosmological cultures along confessional and political lines of alliance and opposition. This research project addresses the interrelations between [1.] cosmological debates in the northern European Protestant institutional networks of scholars and institutions and [2.] cosmological debates in Jesuit institutional networks aiming at [3.] a comparative assessment of early formations and transformations of epistemic webs. It considers parallelisms and contrasts, negotiations and intersections of seventeenth-century cosmological discourses between scholars, institutions and scientific communities belonging to different epistemic cultures. This endeavor brings into focus the political-confessional dimension of early-modern cosmology and shows how science is embedded in struggles for cultural hegemony, struggles which were at once institutional and ideological. While there is a great deal of in-depth study on the history of science in various early-modern confessional contexts, a comparative study bringing together the history of knowledge institutions and their metaphysical legitimation is still a desideratum.
Summary
The focus of this project is the competing confessional discourses on cosmology of the seventeenth century, an epoch in which religious conflicts originated opposing ‘epistemic cultures’, which were embodied in scholarly institutions and networks such as the Protestant web of northern European universities or the global web of Jesuit colleges.
In the Early Modern Period cosmological controversies (over issues such as heliocentrism, plurality of worlds, space, infinity, cometary theory, celestial matter and fluidity) were heated and amplified by increasing political and confessional fragmentation. The Roman prohibition of the Copernican system (1616) and the extraordinary condemnation of Galileo (1633) accelerated the formation of competing cosmological cultures along confessional and political lines of alliance and opposition. This research project addresses the interrelations between [1.] cosmological debates in the northern European Protestant institutional networks of scholars and institutions and [2.] cosmological debates in Jesuit institutional networks aiming at [3.] a comparative assessment of early formations and transformations of epistemic webs. It considers parallelisms and contrasts, negotiations and intersections of seventeenth-century cosmological discourses between scholars, institutions and scientific communities belonging to different epistemic cultures. This endeavor brings into focus the political-confessional dimension of early-modern cosmology and shows how science is embedded in struggles for cultural hegemony, struggles which were at once institutional and ideological. While there is a great deal of in-depth study on the history of science in various early-modern confessional contexts, a comparative study bringing together the history of knowledge institutions and their metaphysical legitimation is still a desideratum.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 976 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31
Project acronym ECONOMICHISTORY
Project Contracts, Institutions, and Markets in Historical Perspective
Researcher (PI) Maristella Botticini
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2011-ADG_20110406
Summary A growing number of scholars are studying the interactions between cultural values, social and religious norms, institutions, and economic outcomes. The rise of markets, as well as the development of contracts that enable mutually beneficial transactions among agents, are one of the central themes in the literature on long-term economic growth.
This project contributes to both strands of literature by studying the invention and development of marine insurance contracts in medieval Italy and their subsequent spread all over Europe. It brings the economic approach to previously unexplored historical data housed in archives in Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice.
The interest in the historical origin and development of marine insurance contracts is twofold. First, marine contracts are the “parents” of all the other insurance contracts (e.g., fire, life, health, etc) that were developed in subsequent centuries to cope with risk. Second, their invention, as well as other innovations in business practices in the Middle Ages, contributed to the growth of international trade in subsequent centuries.
The key novelty of the project stems from combining contract theory with information from thousands of insurance contracts between 1300 and 1550 to explain why marine insurance developed in medieval Italy and then Europe, to study the empirical determinants of insurance contracts in medieval Italy, and to analyze how medieval merchants coped with adverse selection and moral hazard problems.
Most scholars agree that marine insurance was unknown to the ancient world. Italian merchants developed the first insurance contracts and other innovations in business practices during and in the aftermath of the Commercial Revolution that swept Europe from roughly 1275 to about 1325. Marine insurance contracts may have developed as a spin-off of earlier contracts which shifted the risk from one party to another (e.g., sea loan, insurance loan). Alternatively, in the early or mid-fourteenth century, sedentary merchants that provided the capital to travelling merchants invented a new type of contract, when they discovered that the existing contract forms had shortcomings in transferring and dividing sea risk.
A sample of the questions that this project will address includes:
- Why did insurance contracts and a marine insurance market first develop in medieval times and not earlier despite merchants had to deal with the risks associated with maritime trade since antiquity?
- What were the empirical determinants of contract form (e.g., insurance premium) in the medieval insurance market?
- How did medieval merchants compute insurance premia without having the formal notion of probability that was developed only in the mid-seventeenth century?
- How did medieval merchants cope with the typical problems that plague insurance markets, i.e., adverse selection and moral hazard?
Summary
A growing number of scholars are studying the interactions between cultural values, social and religious norms, institutions, and economic outcomes. The rise of markets, as well as the development of contracts that enable mutually beneficial transactions among agents, are one of the central themes in the literature on long-term economic growth.
This project contributes to both strands of literature by studying the invention and development of marine insurance contracts in medieval Italy and their subsequent spread all over Europe. It brings the economic approach to previously unexplored historical data housed in archives in Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice.
The interest in the historical origin and development of marine insurance contracts is twofold. First, marine contracts are the “parents” of all the other insurance contracts (e.g., fire, life, health, etc) that were developed in subsequent centuries to cope with risk. Second, their invention, as well as other innovations in business practices in the Middle Ages, contributed to the growth of international trade in subsequent centuries.
The key novelty of the project stems from combining contract theory with information from thousands of insurance contracts between 1300 and 1550 to explain why marine insurance developed in medieval Italy and then Europe, to study the empirical determinants of insurance contracts in medieval Italy, and to analyze how medieval merchants coped with adverse selection and moral hazard problems.
Most scholars agree that marine insurance was unknown to the ancient world. Italian merchants developed the first insurance contracts and other innovations in business practices during and in the aftermath of the Commercial Revolution that swept Europe from roughly 1275 to about 1325. Marine insurance contracts may have developed as a spin-off of earlier contracts which shifted the risk from one party to another (e.g., sea loan, insurance loan). Alternatively, in the early or mid-fourteenth century, sedentary merchants that provided the capital to travelling merchants invented a new type of contract, when they discovered that the existing contract forms had shortcomings in transferring and dividing sea risk.
A sample of the questions that this project will address includes:
- Why did insurance contracts and a marine insurance market first develop in medieval times and not earlier despite merchants had to deal with the risks associated with maritime trade since antiquity?
- What were the empirical determinants of contract form (e.g., insurance premium) in the medieval insurance market?
- How did medieval merchants compute insurance premia without having the formal notion of probability that was developed only in the mid-seventeenth century?
- How did medieval merchants cope with the typical problems that plague insurance markets, i.e., adverse selection and moral hazard?
Max ERC Funding
1 113 900 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30
Project acronym ECSPLAIN
Project Early Cortical Sensory Plasticity and Adaptability in Human Adults
Researcher (PI) Maria Concetta Morrone
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA DI PISA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH4, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary Neuronal plasticity is an important mechanism for memory and cognition, and also fundamental to fine-tune perception to the environment. It has long been thought that sensory neural systems are plastic only in very young animals, during the so-called “critical period”. However, recent evidence – including work from our laboratory – suggests that the adult brain may retain far more capacity for plastic change than previously assumed, even for basic visual properties like ocular dominance. This project probes the underlying neural mechanisms of adult human plasticity, and investigates its functional role in important processes such as response optimization, auto-calibration and recovery of function. We propose a range of experiments employing many experimental techniques, organized within four principle research lines. The first (and major) research line studies the effects of brief periods of monocular deprivation on functional cortical reorganization of adults, measured by psychophysics (binocular rivalry), ERP, functional imaging and MR spectroscopy. We will also investigate the clinical implications of monocular patching of children with amblyopia. Another research line looks at the effects of longer-term deprivation, such as those induced by hereditary cone dystrophy. Another examines the interplay between plasticity and visual adaptation in early visual cortex, with techniques aimed to modulate retinotopic organization of primary visual cortex. Finally we will use fMRI to study development and plasticity in newborns, providing benchmark data to assess residual plasticity of older humans. Pilot studies have been conducted on most of the proposed lines of research (including fMRI recording from alert newborns), attesting to their feasibility and the likelihood of them being completed within the timeframe of this grant. The PI has considerable experience in all these research areas.
Summary
Neuronal plasticity is an important mechanism for memory and cognition, and also fundamental to fine-tune perception to the environment. It has long been thought that sensory neural systems are plastic only in very young animals, during the so-called “critical period”. However, recent evidence – including work from our laboratory – suggests that the adult brain may retain far more capacity for plastic change than previously assumed, even for basic visual properties like ocular dominance. This project probes the underlying neural mechanisms of adult human plasticity, and investigates its functional role in important processes such as response optimization, auto-calibration and recovery of function. We propose a range of experiments employing many experimental techniques, organized within four principle research lines. The first (and major) research line studies the effects of brief periods of monocular deprivation on functional cortical reorganization of adults, measured by psychophysics (binocular rivalry), ERP, functional imaging and MR spectroscopy. We will also investigate the clinical implications of monocular patching of children with amblyopia. Another research line looks at the effects of longer-term deprivation, such as those induced by hereditary cone dystrophy. Another examines the interplay between plasticity and visual adaptation in early visual cortex, with techniques aimed to modulate retinotopic organization of primary visual cortex. Finally we will use fMRI to study development and plasticity in newborns, providing benchmark data to assess residual plasticity of older humans. Pilot studies have been conducted on most of the proposed lines of research (including fMRI recording from alert newborns), attesting to their feasibility and the likelihood of them being completed within the timeframe of this grant. The PI has considerable experience in all these research areas.
Max ERC Funding
2 493 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-05-01, End date: 2019-04-30
Project acronym EINITE
Project "Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800"
Researcher (PI) Guido Alfani
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2011-StG_20101124
Summary "The aim of EINITE is to clarify the dynamics of economic inequality in Europe from the late Middle Ages up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Very little data about economic inequality during such an early period is available today. Apart from some studies focussed on single years and small areas (usually only one city or a village), the only European region which has been the object of a large research project is Holland.
The project will collect an extensive database about economic inequality, mainly of wealth (for which better documentation exists), focussing on Italy from a wider European perspective. Archival research will be concentrated on Italy where particularly good sources exist, but the Italian case will be placed in the varying European context. Published data and existing databases from all over the continent will be collected as terms of comparison. The final version of the project database will be made public.
The activity of ENITE will be organized around four main research questions:
1) What is the long-term relationship between economic growth and inequality?
This is the main question to which the others are all connected.
2) What were the effects of plagues and other severe mortality crises on property structures?
3) What is the underlying relationship between immigration and urban inequality?
4) How was economic inequality perceived in the past, and how did its perception change over time?
The project will also help to explain the origin of the property structures and inequality levels to be found on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Then, it will provide information relevant to the ‘Kuznets curve’ debate. Overall the project will lead to a better knowledge of economic inequality in the past, which is also expected to help understanding recent developments in inequality levels in Europe and elsewhere."
Summary
"The aim of EINITE is to clarify the dynamics of economic inequality in Europe from the late Middle Ages up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Very little data about economic inequality during such an early period is available today. Apart from some studies focussed on single years and small areas (usually only one city or a village), the only European region which has been the object of a large research project is Holland.
The project will collect an extensive database about economic inequality, mainly of wealth (for which better documentation exists), focussing on Italy from a wider European perspective. Archival research will be concentrated on Italy where particularly good sources exist, but the Italian case will be placed in the varying European context. Published data and existing databases from all over the continent will be collected as terms of comparison. The final version of the project database will be made public.
The activity of ENITE will be organized around four main research questions:
1) What is the long-term relationship between economic growth and inequality?
This is the main question to which the others are all connected.
2) What were the effects of plagues and other severe mortality crises on property structures?
3) What is the underlying relationship between immigration and urban inequality?
4) How was economic inequality perceived in the past, and how did its perception change over time?
The project will also help to explain the origin of the property structures and inequality levels to be found on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Then, it will provide information relevant to the ‘Kuznets curve’ debate. Overall the project will lead to a better knowledge of economic inequality in the past, which is also expected to help understanding recent developments in inequality levels in Europe and elsewhere."
Max ERC Funding
995 400 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31
Project acronym ESEMO
Project Estimation of General Equilibrium Labor Market Search Models
Researcher (PI) Claudio Michelacci
Host Institution (HI) Istituto Einaudi per l'Economia e la Finanza
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2011-ADG_20110406
Summary "My proposal deals with the estimation of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models with important heterogeneity at the level of firms and households and frictions in the labor market. In the estimation I will exploit mixed frequency data (monthly, quarterly and annual) available in different countries. I will also efficiently take care of possible missing values in the data. This might require developing new estimation techniques. The contribution of the project will be in dealing with important empirically relevant questions. I will address issues that lie at the boundaries between labour economics, business cycle analysis, monetary economics, finance, and growth. In particular I will answer the following questions:
1. How are business cycle costs distributed across different individuals? How costly is involuntary unemployment?
2. Which view best characterizes the process of technology adoption at business cycle frequencies? In particular does Schumpeterian creative destruction play a role in characterizing the adoption of new technologies over the business cycle?
3. What are the welfare costs of the search inefficiencies present in the process of worker reallocation over the business cycle?
4. What are the sources of business cycle fluctuations? And in particular are technology shocks an important driving force?
5. What are the contribution of the job separation rate and the importance of the intensive margin relative to the extensive margin in characterizing aggregate labor market fluctuations?
6. What are the main differences in the cyclical properties of the labor market across the OECD? And which institutions explain these differences?
7. What are the effects of financial sector shocks? And why has the Beveridge curve shifted during the last world wide recession?
8. How policy should respond to the large variation in unemployment risk that individual workers face over their life cycle?"
Summary
"My proposal deals with the estimation of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models with important heterogeneity at the level of firms and households and frictions in the labor market. In the estimation I will exploit mixed frequency data (monthly, quarterly and annual) available in different countries. I will also efficiently take care of possible missing values in the data. This might require developing new estimation techniques. The contribution of the project will be in dealing with important empirically relevant questions. I will address issues that lie at the boundaries between labour economics, business cycle analysis, monetary economics, finance, and growth. In particular I will answer the following questions:
1. How are business cycle costs distributed across different individuals? How costly is involuntary unemployment?
2. Which view best characterizes the process of technology adoption at business cycle frequencies? In particular does Schumpeterian creative destruction play a role in characterizing the adoption of new technologies over the business cycle?
3. What are the welfare costs of the search inefficiencies present in the process of worker reallocation over the business cycle?
4. What are the sources of business cycle fluctuations? And in particular are technology shocks an important driving force?
5. What are the contribution of the job separation rate and the importance of the intensive margin relative to the extensive margin in characterizing aggregate labor market fluctuations?
6. What are the main differences in the cyclical properties of the labor market across the OECD? And which institutions explain these differences?
7. What are the effects of financial sector shocks? And why has the Beveridge curve shifted during the last world wide recession?
8. How policy should respond to the large variation in unemployment risk that individual workers face over their life cycle?"
Max ERC Funding
1 659 169 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-03-01, End date: 2017-02-28
