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 ISLHORNAFR
Project Islam in the Horn of Africa: A Comparative Literary Approach
Researcher (PI) Alessandro Gori
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2012-ADG_20120411
Summary "The study of Africa as a region ""peripheral"" to mainstream Islamic studies helps a deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics of Islam. While North African Islam has been subject to extensive research, the Muslim cultures of sub-Saharan Africa have received relatively little attention; most of it paid to West African regions. This project will contribute to both African and Islamic studies by producing for the first time a critical evaluation of textual witnesses of Islamic culture in the Horn of Africa (esp. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland) and therefore considerably contribute to the change in the state-of-the-art in both Islamic and African studies.
The comparative study will be the first to assess simultaneously types and contents of texts, their transmission history, and the role they (as well as the respective authors and copyists) have played in the culture and identity formation in both the Horn of Africa and the “heartland” Islamic countries. Both Arabic texts as well as those written in local languages (using Arabic alphabet: ajami) will be considered, allowing an evaluation of linguistic and cultural influences. A reevaluation of the external Islamic sources dealing with these areas will complete the picture.
Competences in philology, history, manuscript studies, linguistics and computer science will be merged in producing a Digital Research Environment for North-East African Islam. More than a corpus of centrally collected data, it will include images accompanied by searchable descriptive metadata, digital text editions, bibliography as well as an open access database for quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of text and documentary corpora as well as their linguistic and graphic features will serve as a tool for the project and as a basis for future research.
The research findings will provide a deeper understanding of Muslim thought and proselytism, and the effects Islam has had on society."
Summary
"The study of Africa as a region ""peripheral"" to mainstream Islamic studies helps a deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics of Islam. While North African Islam has been subject to extensive research, the Muslim cultures of sub-Saharan Africa have received relatively little attention; most of it paid to West African regions. This project will contribute to both African and Islamic studies by producing for the first time a critical evaluation of textual witnesses of Islamic culture in the Horn of Africa (esp. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland) and therefore considerably contribute to the change in the state-of-the-art in both Islamic and African studies.
The comparative study will be the first to assess simultaneously types and contents of texts, their transmission history, and the role they (as well as the respective authors and copyists) have played in the culture and identity formation in both the Horn of Africa and the “heartland” Islamic countries. Both Arabic texts as well as those written in local languages (using Arabic alphabet: ajami) will be considered, allowing an evaluation of linguistic and cultural influences. A reevaluation of the external Islamic sources dealing with these areas will complete the picture.
Competences in philology, history, manuscript studies, linguistics and computer science will be merged in producing a Digital Research Environment for North-East African Islam. More than a corpus of centrally collected data, it will include images accompanied by searchable descriptive metadata, digital text editions, bibliography as well as an open access database for quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of text and documentary corpora as well as their linguistic and graphic features will serve as a tool for the project and as a basis for future research.
The research findings will provide a deeper understanding of Muslim thought and proselytism, and the effects Islam has had on society."
Max ERC Funding
1 550 200 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2018-12-31
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 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 MOS
Project Manifestations of Solitude: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long seventeenth-century
Researcher (PI) Mette Birkedal Bruun
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary The objective of Manifestations of Solitude: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long seventeenth-century is to demonstrate how the creation of zones of unworldliness within the world structures re-ligious practice. We will examine withdrawal in its historical settings and uncover the facetted na-ture of this phenomenon in the seventeenth-century religious culture, thus offering insights and tools for a better understanding of the representation of religious experience in European culture.
Working across cultural and confessional boundaries, the project explores appropriations of the appeal that the Christian be in the world but not of the world: in texts, architecture, images and mu-sic, and it examines the ways in which these media are employed to prompt and sustain with¬drawal from the world. The project focuses on ten institutional social units (e.g. the abbey, the Konventikel, the household), which manifest solitude in different ways. It examines such units through ten exem-plary places (e.g. Herrnhut, Saint-Cyr) and their cultural and reli¬gious life, drawing on materials such as architectural plans, interior decoration, treatises on theology and aesthetics, letters, diaries, epitaphs, emblems, portraits, devotional images, sermons and musical pieces.
The backbone of the project is an innovative strategy for interdisciplinary analysis which traces the generation of a symbolically charged space around religious withdrawals. With this analytical tool we will examine how symbols of ‘world’, ‘solitude’ and the demarcation between them are materialized in forms ranging from material culture (architecture, furnishing), via artistic, perfor-mative expressions (devotional images, musical pieces) to literary topoi and metaphors and the in-fluence on such forms of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. The project examines the cultivation of the religious self: shaping a sym¬bolically charged space – and shaped in turn by this space.
Summary
The objective of Manifestations of Solitude: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long seventeenth-century is to demonstrate how the creation of zones of unworldliness within the world structures re-ligious practice. We will examine withdrawal in its historical settings and uncover the facetted na-ture of this phenomenon in the seventeenth-century religious culture, thus offering insights and tools for a better understanding of the representation of religious experience in European culture.
Working across cultural and confessional boundaries, the project explores appropriations of the appeal that the Christian be in the world but not of the world: in texts, architecture, images and mu-sic, and it examines the ways in which these media are employed to prompt and sustain with¬drawal from the world. The project focuses on ten institutional social units (e.g. the abbey, the Konventikel, the household), which manifest solitude in different ways. It examines such units through ten exem-plary places (e.g. Herrnhut, Saint-Cyr) and their cultural and reli¬gious life, drawing on materials such as architectural plans, interior decoration, treatises on theology and aesthetics, letters, diaries, epitaphs, emblems, portraits, devotional images, sermons and musical pieces.
The backbone of the project is an innovative strategy for interdisciplinary analysis which traces the generation of a symbolically charged space around religious withdrawals. With this analytical tool we will examine how symbols of ‘world’, ‘solitude’ and the demarcation between them are materialized in forms ranging from material culture (architecture, furnishing), via artistic, perfor-mative expressions (devotional images, musical pieces) to literary topoi and metaphors and the in-fluence on such forms of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. The project examines the cultivation of the religious self: shaping a sym¬bolically charged space – and shaped in turn by this space.
Max ERC Funding
1 250 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2017-03-31
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
