ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

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.

1 210 000 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2017-12-31

"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."

995 400 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

The work laid out in this proposal aims to change our understanding of labor markets by viewing both the mobility as well as the frictions in the market as a consequence of long-term worker heterogeneity. Despite the advances in information technology which substantially reduce the costs of sending information (job advertisements, job applications) extracting the relevant information about worker quality remains hard. Long-term differences in ability coupled with screening frictions are proposed as the main reason for mismatch, for mobility, and for the presence of unemployment. The proposal is based on novel empirical observations on occupational mobility. Both low-paid workers as well as high-paid workers in an occupation tend to leave it. The former tend to move to occupations with lower average pay, while the opposite holds for the latter. This happens even within firms, and after excluding managerial positions. Most work on selection assumes that low-earners leave. This data suggest a novel angle: Workers have a long-term type that affects productivity in their current and in new occupations. They might accumulate human capital, but also their baseline ability is imperfectly known. Unexpectedly low performers (low-wage workers) have to leave towards less demanding tasks, while high performers change to more demanding tasks. This consistently accounts for the observed selection patterns. When workers know more about their ability than new firms, this also explains unemployment: firms spend efforts on screening, and impose costs on workers to induce them to self-select. The latter counteracts exogenous reductions in workers’ search costs. The aim is to develop a tractable model of screening unemployment that can serve as a building block in larger macro-labor models, and to assess the work of the government employment agency through the lens of a mechanism designer that facilitates match-making but relies on firms for additional screening of the unemployed.

1 170 000 €

Start date: 2012-09-01, End date: 2017-08-31

The complex set of relationships among economic agents has profound effects on individuals’ behaviour and economic outcomes. This premise, which finds strong empirical support, is at the basis of the recent development of the economic theory of networks. Research on networks in the last 15 years has set up a common tool to model and study complex relationships within the economic paradigm. This project will advance the state of the art by 1) furthering the development of network theory in economics, and 2) developing new applied models of networks in economics. The project is organised into three, inter-related sub-projects. In sub-project 1, networks will be used to represent different markets architectures. The objectives are to explain how trading mechanisms and the architecture of the network jointly shape the properties of the market equilibrium, and to provide normative insights on how to organize and regulate markets where trading networks are in place. In sub-project 2, networks will be used to model organizations. The objectives are to improve our understanding of the optimal design of an organization, and to provide a rationale for the current empirical organizational trends from hierarchical to more decentralised organizations. In sub-project 3, networks will be used to model communication. The objectives are to improve our understanding of information aggregation in multi-player environments, and to apply these insights to understand the effect of strategic communication on political games.

944 260 €

Start date: 2011-10-01, End date: 2016-09-30