Project acronym FRICTIONS
Project Financial Frictions
Researcher (PI) Lasse Heje Pedersen
Host Institution (HI) COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH1, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary "Financial economics is at a crossroads: Academics are struggling to redefine the theory of finance and practitioners and regulators to restructure the financial industry. The current financial crisis will have significant impact on how we regulate financial markets and how we manage risk in companies and financial institutions. It will continue to inspire an intense discussion and research agenda over the next decade in academics, in industry, and among financial regulators and a central focus will be the role of frictions in financial markets. Nowhere are these issues more pertinent than in Europe right now.
To take up the challenge presented by this crossroad of financial economics, my research project seeks to contribute to the knowledge of financial frictions and what to do about them. FRICTIONS will explore how financial frictions affect asset prices and the economy, and the implications of frictions for financial risk management, the optimal regulation, and the conduct of monetary policy.
Whereas economists have traditionally focused on the assumption of perfect markets, a growing body of evidence is leading to a widespread recognition that markets are plagued by significant financial frictions. FRICTIONS will model key financial frictions such as leverage constraints, margin requirements, transaction costs, liquidity risk, and short sale constraints. The objective is to develop theories of the origins of these frictions, study how these frictions change over time and across markets, and, importantly, how they affect the required return on assets and the economy.
The project will test these theories using data from global equity, bond, and derivative markets. In particular, the project will measure these frictions empirically and study the empirical effect of frictions on asset returns and economic dynamics. The end result is an empirically-validated model of economic behavior subject to financial frictions that yields qualitative and quantitative insights."
Summary
"Financial economics is at a crossroads: Academics are struggling to redefine the theory of finance and practitioners and regulators to restructure the financial industry. The current financial crisis will have significant impact on how we regulate financial markets and how we manage risk in companies and financial institutions. It will continue to inspire an intense discussion and research agenda over the next decade in academics, in industry, and among financial regulators and a central focus will be the role of frictions in financial markets. Nowhere are these issues more pertinent than in Europe right now.
To take up the challenge presented by this crossroad of financial economics, my research project seeks to contribute to the knowledge of financial frictions and what to do about them. FRICTIONS will explore how financial frictions affect asset prices and the economy, and the implications of frictions for financial risk management, the optimal regulation, and the conduct of monetary policy.
Whereas economists have traditionally focused on the assumption of perfect markets, a growing body of evidence is leading to a widespread recognition that markets are plagued by significant financial frictions. FRICTIONS will model key financial frictions such as leverage constraints, margin requirements, transaction costs, liquidity risk, and short sale constraints. The objective is to develop theories of the origins of these frictions, study how these frictions change over time and across markets, and, importantly, how they affect the required return on assets and the economy.
The project will test these theories using data from global equity, bond, and derivative markets. In particular, the project will measure these frictions empirically and study the empirical effect of frictions on asset returns and economic dynamics. The end result is an empirically-validated model of economic behavior subject to financial frictions that yields qualitative and quantitative insights."
Max ERC Funding
1 307 160 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31
Project acronym HHPOLITICS
Project A Household Finance Theory of Political Attitudes and Political Behavior
Researcher (PI) David Dreyer Lassen
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary "How do individuals insure themselves against economic shocks, as consumers and savers on their own, and as voters, through the political process? The recent financial and economic crisis has seen people lose their jobs and their housing equity, partly as a result of insufficient economic buffers in good times. What does this mean for social insurance? We need to understand the connection between household finances and political attitudes to social insurance and redistribution, both in good times and in bad.
I argue that in order to understand the political economy of redistribution and social insruance, we need to allow for imperfect asset markets in the form of liquidity (or credit) constraints and for asset holdings, including housing equity.
The goal of the project is to investigate theoretically and empirically on Danish data (i) how differences in liquidity constraints affect political attitudes and preferences; (ii) where such differences come from and what that means for understanding links between personal traits and personality, socio-economics and political attitudes and behaviour; (iii) how these insights can be used to understand political attitudes towards the new wave of neo-paternalistic policies (including so-called ‘nudging’) inspired by behavioural economic research; and (iv) whether differences in liquidity constraints can help us understand changes in political attitudes and preferences over the long-run.
The central empirical part of the project is to link uniquely detailed individual level high quality data from Danish administrative registers - including current and historical data on all tax-declared income sources, bank deposits, assets and liabilities, as well as detailed demographics, educational and occupational data - to a running, large-scale panel survey of a large random sample of adult Danes, and to extend this survey both in time and in scope, specifically with questions on political attitudes and political preferences."
Summary
"How do individuals insure themselves against economic shocks, as consumers and savers on their own, and as voters, through the political process? The recent financial and economic crisis has seen people lose their jobs and their housing equity, partly as a result of insufficient economic buffers in good times. What does this mean for social insurance? We need to understand the connection between household finances and political attitudes to social insurance and redistribution, both in good times and in bad.
I argue that in order to understand the political economy of redistribution and social insruance, we need to allow for imperfect asset markets in the form of liquidity (or credit) constraints and for asset holdings, including housing equity.
The goal of the project is to investigate theoretically and empirically on Danish data (i) how differences in liquidity constraints affect political attitudes and preferences; (ii) where such differences come from and what that means for understanding links between personal traits and personality, socio-economics and political attitudes and behaviour; (iii) how these insights can be used to understand political attitudes towards the new wave of neo-paternalistic policies (including so-called ‘nudging’) inspired by behavioural economic research; and (iv) whether differences in liquidity constraints can help us understand changes in political attitudes and preferences over the long-run.
The central empirical part of the project is to link uniquely detailed individual level high quality data from Danish administrative registers - including current and historical data on all tax-declared income sources, bank deposits, assets and liabilities, as well as detailed demographics, educational and occupational data - to a running, large-scale panel survey of a large random sample of adult Danes, and to extend this survey both in time and in scope, specifically with questions on political attitudes and political preferences."
Max ERC Funding
1 499 740 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31
Project acronym ITEPE
Project Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy
- A Socio-Legal Approach
Researcher (PI) Poul Fritz Kjær
Host Institution (HI) COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary The objective is to develop a socio-legal theory explaining the institutional transformations from corporatism over neo-corporatism to governance and the role of law and legal instruments within the 3 types of institutions.
The period of investigation covers the period between 1850 and today and is limited to the European setting.
The core hypothesis is that corporatism, neo-corporatism and governance fulfil identical societal functions under altered structural conditions insofar as they simultaneously are oriented towards the internal stabilisation of economic processes and the establishment of compatibility with non-economic segments of society. The successful fulfilment of this dual function is furthermore conditioned upon a reliance on formalised legal frameworks.
In concrete the project wishes to provide an alternative to the a-historical nature of contemporary governance research; counter the lack of a dynamic perspective within the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach; offset the reductionist stance of political economy studies as reflected in the narrowing of economy and society relations to the binary relationship between economy and politics; develop a theoretical framework capable of connecting a wide range of so far disperse academic discourses such as governance research, political economy and socio-legal studies; provide a central contribution to a new inter-systemic theory of society.
The project contains detailed case studies in relation to the development of institutional stabilisation within the European steel and pharmaceutical sectors.
Summary
The objective is to develop a socio-legal theory explaining the institutional transformations from corporatism over neo-corporatism to governance and the role of law and legal instruments within the 3 types of institutions.
The period of investigation covers the period between 1850 and today and is limited to the European setting.
The core hypothesis is that corporatism, neo-corporatism and governance fulfil identical societal functions under altered structural conditions insofar as they simultaneously are oriented towards the internal stabilisation of economic processes and the establishment of compatibility with non-economic segments of society. The successful fulfilment of this dual function is furthermore conditioned upon a reliance on formalised legal frameworks.
In concrete the project wishes to provide an alternative to the a-historical nature of contemporary governance research; counter the lack of a dynamic perspective within the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach; offset the reductionist stance of political economy studies as reflected in the narrowing of economy and society relations to the binary relationship between economy and politics; develop a theoretical framework capable of connecting a wide range of so far disperse academic discourses such as governance research, political economy and socio-legal studies; provide a central contribution to a new inter-systemic theory of society.
The project contains detailed case studies in relation to the development of institutional stabilisation within the European steel and pharmaceutical sectors.
Max ERC Funding
1 175 210 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2017-07-31
Project acronym LONGEVITYBYCAUSE
Project Cause of Death Contribution to Longevity: Modeling Time Trends
Researcher (PI) Vladimir Canudas Romo
Host Institution (HI) SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2009-StG
Summary Since the mid-nineteen century life expectancy in developed countries has doubled, increasing from levels around 40 years to above 80 years. This research project is motivated by the need to further explore how societies have achieved the current levels of longevity, in terms of life expectancy and modal age at death. To achieve this, age-patterns and time-trends in cause of death contribution to longevity are assessed. This historical analysis is carried out in fifty developed and developing countries/areas. It is expected that the cause of death contribution to the advancement of longevity is country/region specific. However, the hypothesis to be tested is that there are common cause-specific time-trends across countries which can be described by a model of cause of death contribution to longevity. Several purposes for such a model can be listed: it will allow us to study expected future mortality directions in developed nations that are currently still facing high levels of some particular causes of death, e.g. the Netherlands and United States. It could also help investigating the retrocession in mortality observed in some transitional countries/areas, particularly in Eastern Europe. Finally, the accelerated epidemiological transition in developing countries is compared to the slower trend in the developed world at earlier times, model results versus observed cause-contribution. The interest in the latter comparison is to foresee the increase in the prevalence of chronic disease in low-income countries predicted by the WHO and the World Bank. Furthermore, one in every three countries in the world has adequate cause-specific mortality data. The proposed model could facilitate estimating the current cause of death status in developing countries. This project addresses a significant question concerning the mechanisms (age and cause of death) that direct reductions in mortality.
Summary
Since the mid-nineteen century life expectancy in developed countries has doubled, increasing from levels around 40 years to above 80 years. This research project is motivated by the need to further explore how societies have achieved the current levels of longevity, in terms of life expectancy and modal age at death. To achieve this, age-patterns and time-trends in cause of death contribution to longevity are assessed. This historical analysis is carried out in fifty developed and developing countries/areas. It is expected that the cause of death contribution to the advancement of longevity is country/region specific. However, the hypothesis to be tested is that there are common cause-specific time-trends across countries which can be described by a model of cause of death contribution to longevity. Several purposes for such a model can be listed: it will allow us to study expected future mortality directions in developed nations that are currently still facing high levels of some particular causes of death, e.g. the Netherlands and United States. It could also help investigating the retrocession in mortality observed in some transitional countries/areas, particularly in Eastern Europe. Finally, the accelerated epidemiological transition in developing countries is compared to the slower trend in the developed world at earlier times, model results versus observed cause-contribution. The interest in the latter comparison is to foresee the increase in the prevalence of chronic disease in low-income countries predicted by the WHO and the World Bank. Furthermore, one in every three countries in the world has adequate cause-specific mortality data. The proposed model could facilitate estimating the current cause of death status in developing countries. This project addresses a significant question concerning the mechanisms (age and cause of death) that direct reductions in mortality.
Max ERC Funding
300 380 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-05-01, End date: 2015-04-30
Project acronym LOWLANDS
Project Parsing low-resource languages and domains
Researcher (PI) Anders Søgaard
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary "There are noticeable asymmetries in availability of high-quality natural language processing (NLP). We can adequately summarize English newspapers and translate them into Korean, but we cannot translate Korean newspaper articles into English, and summarizing micro-blogs is much more difficult than summarizing newspaper articles. This is a fundamental problem for modern societies, their development and democracy, as well as perhaps the most important research problem in NLP right now.
Most NLP technologies rely on highly accurate syntactic parsing. Reliable parsing models can be induced from large collections of manually annotated data, but such collections are typically limited to sampled newswire in major languages. Highly accurate parsing is therefore not available for other languages and other domains.
The NLP community is well aware of this problem, but unsupervised techniques that do not rely on manually annotated data cannot be used for real-world applications, where highly accurate parsing is needed, and sample bias correction methods that automatically correct the bias in newswire when parsing, say, micro-blogs, do not yet lead to robust improvements across the board.
The objective of this project is to develop new learning methods for parsing natural language for which no unbiased labeled data exists. In order to do so, we need to fundamentally rethink the unsupervised parsing problem, including how we evaluate unsupervised parsers, but we also need to supplement unsupervised learning techniques with robust methods for automatically correcting sample selection biases in related data. Such methods will be applicable to both cross-domain and cross-language syntactic parsing and will pave the way toward robust and scalable NLP. The societal impact of robust and scalable NLP is unforeseeable and comparable to how efficient information retrieval techniques have revolutionized modern societies."
Summary
"There are noticeable asymmetries in availability of high-quality natural language processing (NLP). We can adequately summarize English newspapers and translate them into Korean, but we cannot translate Korean newspaper articles into English, and summarizing micro-blogs is much more difficult than summarizing newspaper articles. This is a fundamental problem for modern societies, their development and democracy, as well as perhaps the most important research problem in NLP right now.
Most NLP technologies rely on highly accurate syntactic parsing. Reliable parsing models can be induced from large collections of manually annotated data, but such collections are typically limited to sampled newswire in major languages. Highly accurate parsing is therefore not available for other languages and other domains.
The NLP community is well aware of this problem, but unsupervised techniques that do not rely on manually annotated data cannot be used for real-world applications, where highly accurate parsing is needed, and sample bias correction methods that automatically correct the bias in newswire when parsing, say, micro-blogs, do not yet lead to robust improvements across the board.
The objective of this project is to develop new learning methods for parsing natural language for which no unbiased labeled data exists. In order to do so, we need to fundamentally rethink the unsupervised parsing problem, including how we evaluate unsupervised parsers, but we also need to supplement unsupervised learning techniques with robust methods for automatically correcting sample selection biases in related data. Such methods will be applicable to both cross-domain and cross-language syntactic parsing and will pave the way toward robust and scalable NLP. The societal impact of robust and scalable NLP is unforeseeable and comparable to how efficient information retrieval techniques have revolutionized modern societies."
Max ERC Funding
1 126 183 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31
Project acronym MINDREHAB
Project Consciousness In basic Science And Neurorehabilitation
Researcher (PI) Morten Overgaard
Host Institution (HI) AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2009-StG
Summary This project studies the topic of human consciousness from a multidisciplinary perspective. Human consciousness can be defined as the inner subjective experience of mental states such as perceptions, judgments, thoughts, intentions to act, feelings or desires. These experiences are to be described from a subjective, phenomenal first-person account. On the other hand, cognitive neurosciences explore the neural correlates with respect to brain topology and brain dynamics from an objective third-person account.
Despite a great interest in consciousness among cognitive neuroscientists, there are yet no general agreement on definitions or models, and no attempts to draw conclusions from the existing body of work to make progress in the treatment of patients. While it is generally the case that research in cognitive neuroscience has a minimal influence on clinical work in neurorehabilitation, this is very much the case in consciousness studies. Here, so far, there is no direct connection to clinical practice
MindRehab will make use of an integrated approach to find new ways to understand cognitive dysfunctions and to actually rehabilitate patients with cognitive problems after brain injury. This integrated approach, using consciousness studies to create progress in a clinical area, is novel and does not exist as an explicit goal for any other research group in the world. The objective of MindRehab is to integrate three aspects: Philosophy and basic research on consciousness, and clinical work in neurorehabilitation. Furthermore, the objective is to realize a number of research projects leading to novel contributions at the frontier of all three domains. However, contrary to all other current research projects in this field, the emphasis is put on the latter the clinical work.
Summary
This project studies the topic of human consciousness from a multidisciplinary perspective. Human consciousness can be defined as the inner subjective experience of mental states such as perceptions, judgments, thoughts, intentions to act, feelings or desires. These experiences are to be described from a subjective, phenomenal first-person account. On the other hand, cognitive neurosciences explore the neural correlates with respect to brain topology and brain dynamics from an objective third-person account.
Despite a great interest in consciousness among cognitive neuroscientists, there are yet no general agreement on definitions or models, and no attempts to draw conclusions from the existing body of work to make progress in the treatment of patients. While it is generally the case that research in cognitive neuroscience has a minimal influence on clinical work in neurorehabilitation, this is very much the case in consciousness studies. Here, so far, there is no direct connection to clinical practice
MindRehab will make use of an integrated approach to find new ways to understand cognitive dysfunctions and to actually rehabilitate patients with cognitive problems after brain injury. This integrated approach, using consciousness studies to create progress in a clinical area, is novel and does not exist as an explicit goal for any other research group in the world. The objective of MindRehab is to integrate three aspects: Philosophy and basic research on consciousness, and clinical work in neurorehabilitation. Furthermore, the objective is to realize a number of research projects leading to novel contributions at the frontier of all three domains. However, contrary to all other current research projects in this field, the emphasis is put on the latter the clinical work.
Max ERC Funding
1 641 232 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-06-01, End date: 2015-05-31
Project acronym UNITRAN
Project Understanding Intergenerational Transmissions: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach
Researcher (PI) Mads Meier Jæger
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary This project combines the best sociology and economics has to offer to establish a new understanding of intergenerational transmissions. We know that socioeconomic outcomes are correlated across generations, but we have only little understanding of the mechanisms and intergenerational transmissions which generate these correlations.
In this project, we propose to combine formal models of intergenerational transmissions in economics with substantive insights from sociology to develop new and improved models of intergenerational transmissions. Furthermore, we combine longitudinal data with state-of-the-art econometric methods to analyze intergenerational transmissions of cultural endowments and educational expectations, the role of the extended family in intergenerational transmissions, and finally the utility of educational decision making.
The project has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of intergenerational transmissions and, in doing so, to contribute new knowledge to inform policies to promote social mobility.
Summary
This project combines the best sociology and economics has to offer to establish a new understanding of intergenerational transmissions. We know that socioeconomic outcomes are correlated across generations, but we have only little understanding of the mechanisms and intergenerational transmissions which generate these correlations.
In this project, we propose to combine formal models of intergenerational transmissions in economics with substantive insights from sociology to develop new and improved models of intergenerational transmissions. Furthermore, we combine longitudinal data with state-of-the-art econometric methods to analyze intergenerational transmissions of cultural endowments and educational expectations, the role of the extended family in intergenerational transmissions, and finally the utility of educational decision making.
The project has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of intergenerational transmissions and, in doing so, to contribute new knowledge to inform policies to promote social mobility.
Max ERC Funding
1 358 389 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2018-06-30
