ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Mindfulness-based therapy has become an increasingly popular treatment to reduce stress, increase well-being and prevent relapse in depression. A key component of these therapies includes mindfulness practice that intends to train attention to detect and regulate afflictive cognitive and emotional patterns. Beyond its therapeutic application, the empirical study of mindfulness practice also represents a promising tool to understand practices that intentionally cultivate present-centeredness and openness to experience. Despite its clinical efficacy, little remains known about its means of action. Antithetic to this mode of experiential self-focus are states akin to depression, that are conducive of biased attention toward negativity, biased thoughts and rumination, and dysfunctional self schemas. The proposed research aims at implementing an innovative framework to scientifically investigate the experiential, cognitive, and neural processes underlining mindfulness practice building on the current neurocognitive understanding of the functional and anatomical architecture of cognitive control, and depression. To identify these mechanisms, this project aims to use paradigms from cognitive, and affective neuroscience (MEG, intracortical EEG, fMRI) to measure the training and plasticity of emotion regulation and cognitive control, and their effect on automatic, self-related affective processes. Using a cross-sectional design, this project aims to compare participants with trait differences in experiential self-focus mode. Using a longitudinal design, this project aims to explore mindfulness-practice training’s effect using a standard mindfulness-based intervention and an active control intervention. The PI has pioneered the neuroscientific investigation of mindfulness in the US and aspires to assemble a research team in France and a network of collaborators in Europe to pursue this research, which could lead to important outcomes for neuroscience, and mental health.

1 868 520 €

Start date: 2014-11-01, End date: 2019-10-31

The application's unifying theme is cognition. Any decision reflects the information that comes to the decision-maker's awareness at the moment of making the decision. In turn, this information is the stochastic outcome of a sequence of more or less conscious choices and of awareness manipulation by third parties. The three parts of this application all are concerned with two factors of limited awareness (cognitive costs and motivated beliefs) and with the application of imperfect cognition to economics. The various projects can be subsumed into three themes, each with different subprojects: 1. Self-serving beliefs, laws, norms and taboos (expressive function of the law, taboos, dignity and contracts). 2. Cognition, markets, and contracts (mechanism design under costly cognition, directing attention in markets and politics). 3. Cognition and individual decision-making (foundations of some non-standard preferences). The methodology for this research will be that of formal economic modeling and welfare analysis, enriched with important insights from psychology and sociology. It will also include experimental (laboratory) investigations. The output will first take the form of a series of articles in economics journals, as well as, for the research described in Part 1, a book to disseminate the research to broader, multidisciplinary and non-specialized audiences.

1 910 400 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

"The application proposes to revisit the economics of cooperation and competition in industry vertical chains and develop new tools for industrial organization (IO). Modern IO theory treats firms as unitary, profit-maximizing entities, characterized by well-identified perimeters of activity, and clearly identified either as competitors or as complementors. Yet in practice: - Industry structures are increasingly complex: Firms distribute for example their activities among partners across the globe, and moved to multiple, interlocking relationships. - Firms competing for customers or suppliers are also cooperating in other dimensions, e.g., by setting-up common platforms, or by adopting joint common rules within which to compete. - Supplier -customer relations often involve transaction costs other than pure search costs: adoption costs, learning or shopping costs, or expensive strategies to protect sensitive information. Understanding the interplay between competition and cooperation is key to designing business strategies, but it has also implications for industry oversight: When should cooperation among competitors be limited or encouraged? Over which dimensions? This application proposes to cover three topics: 1. Allocation of tasks and the choice of partners. 2. Multilateral interlocking relations. 3. Cooperation and competition. 4. Transaction costs, buying patterns and business strategies While the project falls primarily in the field of applied theory, some of the developments require new tools and interaction with game theorists. Furthermore, empirical validation will require the use of structural econometric modelling (based in particular on consumer panel data) and laboratory experiments. The project has also an interdisciplinary flavour and will benefit from work of and interactions with legal scholars and marketing experts."

2 068 920 €

Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

In France, the UK, Germany, the US, and Israel, a growing number of films and television series are set ‘behind the scenes’ of democratic regimes faced with terrorist threats. These works reveal a moral state of the world. They may be analysed as ‘mirrors’ of society, or as ideological tools. But they can also be understood as new resources for the education, creativity, and perfectibility of their audiences; as the emergence of a form of ‘soft power’ that can serve as a resource for public policies and democratic conversation. Because of their format (weekly/seasonal regularity, home viewing) and the participatory qualities of the Internet (tweeting, sharing, liking, chat forums), series allow for a new form of education by expressing complex issues through narrative and characters. As a result, TV series are increasingly recognised in current research. However, their aesthetic potential for visualising ethical issues and their capacity at enabling a democratic empowerment of viewers has not yet been analysed ; nor their power for confronting cultural and social upheavals underway, and developing a collective inquiry into democratic values and human security. DEMOSERIES brings together a team of scholars of moral philosophy, film studies, digital media and cultural data, sociology, law and political science, to explore a corpus of TV ‘security series’ from conception to reception. Doing so requires a particularist ethics based on attention to multi-faceted situations, paired with qualitative methods (interviews with security experts, showrunners, viewers; analyses of images, tropes, words; ethnography of reception) and quantitative methods (tweets and web analytics). By elucidating how these series are conceived by their creators and audiences, DEMOSERIES thus aims to understand if and how they might play a crucial role in building the awareness necessary for the safety of individuals and societies, and in creating shared and shareable values in the EU and beyond.

2 216 375 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31

"Income and wealth inequality has widened significantly in many developed countries during the past 40 years, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. In some countries, e.g. the US, income concentration is now higher than in the early decades of the 20th century. EU trends are less strong, but push in the same direction. Yet, despite these puzzling facts, we still know very little about the forces behind the long run evolution of income and wealth distribution. The central objective of this proposal is to better understand the rise in inequality, and more generally to develop a unified empirical and theoretical approach to the distribution and redistribution of income and wealth. First, I propose to construct a new ""World Wealth and Income Database"" (WWID) that will be made public through a dedicated website. Existing inequality data sets are insufficient, first because many countries are not well covered, and mostly because available series concentrate on income inequality and usually do not cover wealth inequality. This is unfortunate, because the theoretical forces at play are very different for income and wealth distributions. The WWID will remedy both deficiencies and allow for a better articulation between available data and theoretical models. Next, I will use this new database to test for the various mechanisms explaining the rise in inequality. In particular, I will explore the extent to which low growth and high returns to wealth naturally push towards higher wealth-income ratios as well as rising wealth concentration. In the near future this mechanism is likely to be particularly strong in low growth Europe (especially in countries with negative population growth). In the long run it can also operate at the level of the global distribution of wealth. I will also develop new theoretical models of optimal taxation of income and wealth. These models will be using a ""sufficient statistics"" approach and will be calibrated using WWID data."

2 489 576 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

The objective of this project is to enhance knowledge in the construction, identification and estimation of dynamic structural microeconomic models that are used for policy evaluation. This research proposal is built up having specific economic applications in mind as these applications involve inter-temporal trade-offs for a single or several decision makers. It first seeks to develop original identification results in these applications and attaches special attention to partial identification issues and constructive identification results so as to easily derive estimation techniques. In each specific application, empirical estimates using micro-data will then be used to construct and analyse counterfactuals. The whole sequence of original identification, estimation and prediction results aims at enhancing the quality and credibility of economic policy evaluations. These research questions will be addressed in frameworks in which dynamic choices are continuous such as the ones regarding human capital investments or discrete such as the college choice decisions. This extends to dynamic games as in the analysis of firms' entry into a market. This research proposal develops micro-econometric analyses devoted to earning dynamics, consumption smoothing and incomplete markets, firms' entry, school matching mechanisms as well as to the dynamics of undergraduate studies and the dynamics of retirement. It involves studies in labor economics, consumer behavior as well as financial econometrics, empirical industrial organization and the economics of education. One last theme of this project is devoted to research in theoretical econometrics analyzing questions derived from the empirical projects. Each empirical project will cross fertilize others and will feed up theoretical econometric analyses related to point or partial identification in various dimensions. In turn, theoretical analyses will inform identification and estimation in each of those specific applications.

1 722 000 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

Given my current state of knowledge, and a desirable state of knowledge, how do I get from one to the other? It is possible in principle to reach the desirable state of knowledge, i.e., does it make sense at all to start trying to obtain the desirable state? If I know it is impossible to obtain, there is no use trying. But even if I know that it is possible in principle, is there a way to approach the desirable state in steps or phases, i.e., can I iteratively construct an epistemic protocol to achieve the desirable state? And can this be done with some or with full assurance that I am getting closer to the goal? Such problems become more complex if they involve more agents. The knowledge states of agents may be in terms of knowledge properties of other agents. Such assumed knowledge properties may be incorrect, or the agents may act at unpredictable or unknown moments, or with delayed or faulty communication channels, as typically in asynchronous systems. The focus of much research in dynamic epistemic logic, and more generally in epistemic and temporal modal logics, is analysis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and some well-specified dynamic process, compute the output epistemic state. In this proposal we focus on synthesis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and desirable output (typically less well specified), find the process transforming the input into the output. The process found is the epistemic protocol. We will be aided by recent advances in logics for propositional quantification. Areas of specific interest are protocols for secure communication, protocol languages, and agency. Our project goal is epistemic protocol synthesis for synchronous and asynchronous multi-agent systems, by way of using and developing dynamic epistemic logics.

951 400 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

The general theme of this research is to introduce the notion of large-scale economic networks into the mainstream of economics, in particular in macroeconomics and international trade. Economic agents often do not have access to all the relevant information they may need: whom they know, whom they interact with represents a small fraction of all possible interactions. I model this limited set of interactions as a network: agents are nodes, and they only interact with other agents they have formed a link with. What is the shape of this network of linkages between agents, and how does it evolve? More importantly, what are the aggregate implications of the shape of this network? These are the broad questions I will address in this research. I will consider six specific applications of this unifying idea in various fields: international trade, IO, macroeconomics and growth. In international trade, we have only a very crude understanding of the frictions that prevent most firms from exporting. I propose to model trade frictions as a dynamic network: at a point in time, a given exporter only has information about a limited set of potential customers in a few foreign countries; over time, this exporter discovers new export opportunities, and its network of customers evolves dynamically. I offer theoretical and empirical tools to understand and analyze the properties of this network, and show how it shapes aggregate trade patterns. In IO and macroeconomics, most plants only have few suppliers. I will model the input-output linkages between plants as a dynamic network; I offer theoretical and empirical tools to analyze this network, and show how it shapes the propagation of plant level shocks to generate aggregate fluctuations. Human capital accumulation is key to economic growth and development, with workers learning from each other. I will model these growth-enhancing interactions as a dynamic network; I will show how the properties of this network shape long run growth.

1 169 400 €

Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

FUTUREPOL seeks to open up a new field of historical and political enquiry around the history of future governance. As an object of governance, the future is notoriously rebellious: difficult to define, defying notions of objectivity and truth. Nevertheless, a crucial feature of modern societies is their belief in the knowability and governability of the future, the belief that through the means of scientific rationality and political power, the future can be controlled. FUTUREPOL aims to study shifting ideas of the knowability and governability of the future, in order to illuminate the process in which the future is transformed from its nebulous and uncertain state into an object of governance. Moreover, it intends an historical analysis of how this process varies over time in the post war period. The project thus asks two central research questions: How does the future become an object of governance? And how is this process different today, than earlier in the post war period? FUTUREPOL will address four problems: First, it will study the origins of futurology and its birth in transnational networks of futurists in the immediate post war period. Second, it intends to study the way that futurists’ ideas were translated into policy and gave rise to public institutions devoted to the future in many countries in Europe and beyond. Third, it will situate these problems in a global field where concerns with national futures are confronted to concerns with the survival of the world system as a whole, and fourth, it aims to study the evolution of the means of future governance over time, and proposes that such an historical analysis of future governance can permit us to historicize central forms of modern governance such as the governance of risk, foresight or scenarios, and thus help us understand the way that contemporary societies engage with the future.

1 302 949 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2017-09-30

"Pharmaceutical drugs provide an ideal window into studying contemporary societies. With dimensions that are simultaneously scientific, therapeutic, popular and commercial, these drugs are central to various issues. ACTs, the new recommended treatment for malaria in Africa, crystallize these issues and provide a case study to investigate the global drug market. This project proposes to use ACTs as a lens to study the realities affecting this market, both in terms of supply and demand in two African countries where the pharmaceutical systems differ significantly. This will involve analyzing the globalizing processes affecting drugs in Benin and Ghana and to study their consequences on public health. To further compare the drug systems and to address the serious issue of the spread of resistances to ACTs from Asia to Africa, the project also proposes conducting a study on the drug system in Cambodia. The central discipline is anthropology, which is extremely relevant to the study of formal and informal pharmaceutical supply and to the analysis of drug use (WP1 and WP2). However, since a multidisciplinary approach is advised for drug studies, the PI will work with an epidemiologist who will study the scope of ACT consumption (WP3) and a sociologist specializing in pharmaceutical legislation who will analyze local production and ACT regulations (WP4). Opening into Asia will occur through WP5. A WP6 is devoted to project management, dissemination of results, organizing two symposiums and institutional twofold impacts: (1) to foster reflection so that more efficient pharmaceutical systems are established in Africa, and (2) to provide critical information to prevent the spread of resistances to ACTs from Asia to Africa. The project includes a substantial training component: 8 master students, 2 PhD and 1 post-doct. The PI’s skills in methodology and theory and the solid partnerships she has developed in Benin and Ghana will support the project’s feasibility."

927 034 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28

Accounting for firms' heterogeneity in trade patterns is probably one of the key innovations of international trade that occurred during the last decade. The impact of initial papers such as Melitz (2003) and Bernard and Jensen (1999) is so large in the field that it is considered to have introduced a new paradigm. Apart from providing a convincing framework for a set of empirical facts, the main motivation of this literature was that there are new gains to be expected from trade liberalization. Those come from a selection process, raising aggregate productivity through the reallocation of output among heterogeneous firms. It initially seemed that the information requirements for trade policy evaluations had become much more demanding, in particular requiring detailed micro data. However, the recent work of Arkolakis et al. (2011) suggests that two aggregate ``sufficient statistics'' may be all that is needed to compute the welfare changes associated with trade liberalization. More, they show that those statistics are the same when evaluating welfare changes in representative firm models. The project has three parts. The first one starts by showing that the sufficient statistics approach relies crucially on a specific distributional assumption on heterogeneity, the Pareto distribution. When distributed non-Pareto, heterogeneity does matter, i.e. aggregate statistics are not sufficient to evaluate welfare changes and predict trade patterns. The second part of the project specifies which type of firm-level heterogeneity matters. It shows how to identify which sectors are characterized by ``productivity sorting'' and in which ones ``quality sorting'' is more relevant. Extending the analysis to multiple product firms, the third part shows that heterogeneity inside the firm also matters for welfare changes following trade shocks. It considers how the change in the product mix of the firm following trade liberalization alters the measured productivity of the firm.

1 119 040 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2018-07-31

"""Making the sea more human."" The project focuses on rebuilding the concepts of maritime and ocean law, given the expansion of human activities at sea. The sea is one of our new frontiers. The development of human activities at sea has led to a transformation of the Law of the Sea and Maritime Law. The main purpose of law is to civilize the new activities opened up by technological innovations. But maritime law remains centred on the concept of the ship, and does not take into account the new marine vessels and their workers. The development of illegal activities at sea questions the competence of States and their cooperation. The HUMAN SEA project will provide critical assessment and perspectives on legal framework related to merchant navy globalisation, illegal activities at sea, and offshore activities. It will summarize the current law concerning international maritime labour in the merchant navy; then consider how the fight against illegal activities led to monitoring of marine areas, thanks to new technologies and through the cooperation of states; then bring the look on ways of managing oil and gas offshore platforms and large liners. Future activities, such as living on the sea, will be considered. Technical innovations predict the development of such use, but the legal framework remains to conceive. The final, overarching task, of the project consists in a conceptual synthesis to define the common principles to be applied for a new maritime law that takes into account activities at sea in their human, environmental, economical and technological dimensions. Such an ambitious project calls for expertise in various domains of law, i.e. Social Law, Economic Law and Environmental Law. The development of human activities at sea requires rethinking concepts rooted in the history of maritime navigation and the very notion of ship and sea, for example. How should we view the twenty-first century civilization through the laws of these new activities at sea?"

1 761 720 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28

"The INCLUSIVE project aims at challenging our very perspective of property by adding an innovative notion, the ‘inclusive right’, in the toolbox of legal and economic theory. Whereas exclusivity is conventionally considered as the core element and purpose of property right, sharing and collectively using resources, either tangible or intellectual, is an increasing practice and a new field of research in the legal, sociological, cultural and economic academy. From public domain in copyright, the open access or copyleft licensing to the multiple and complex authorship resulting from online wiki creation and new forms of cohousing based on common spaces and property, all rely on the lack or limitation of exclusive rights and the accommodation of symmetric entitlements of other individuals. All share a sense of ‘inclusivity’ that can be defined by (1) the absence of a power to exclude others, which leads to inclusion of others in the use and (2) the collectiveness and interdependency of privileges to use a resource. Yet, no legal tool is available to comprehend such inclusivity, but the notion of ‘commons’ devoid of any normative content. The INCLUSIVE project will study allocation of resources grounded on inclusivity and the issues raised by such legal vacuum or inadequate application of exclusivity-based rules. INCLUSIVE will elaborate a legal model of ‘inclusive right’ allowing for organised collectiveness, enforceability and sustainability and assess its applicability in selected fields. Instead of forcing exclusive rights on situations organised around inclusivity, the project radically innovates by rethinking the categories of legal interests, with new conceptual and methodological frameworks and adapted normative criteria. This legal concept could have discrete applications and play a role in two major challenges of our times: the sustainability of natural or informational resources and the connected agency of individuals in the digital environment."

1 361 382 €

Start date: 2014-10-01, End date: 2019-09-30

Beyond Eureka seeks to challenge current understanding of how Japan became a global industrial power along with the model of how innovation takes place. Japan was the first Asian nation to industrialize and in a space of several decades went from a relatively isolated agrarian economy to an industrialized nation. The key assumption of this project is that a grasp of the salient features of the technological landscape during the pivotal period between 1800 and 1885 is an important tool for understanding Japan's industrialization. To date, this transitional period has been widely acknowledged as crucial for later development but remains empirically poorly understood. Recognizing the complexity of causation, this project seeks to use technology as a site for forging a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of Asia's first industrial power. By bringing technological change into historical focus, the project challenges the notion of innovation as necessarily a matter of disruption. In Japanese, for example, there is no conceptual or cultural equivalent to Eureka, to stand for a unique, distinct moment of individual ingenuity. If we choose the Eureka moment to epitomize the conception of innovation, early examples in Japanese industry are few and far between. Instead, a small but growing body of research shows that a sophisticated and patient examination of archives can reveal innovative processes in place of what historiography has described as borrowing, imitation or adaptation. This project seeks to foreground innovation as a long-term process of accumulation in which the new only could only work by taking root and embedding itself within the old, not by replacing it and starting from scratch. The team, comprising the PI and five postdoctoral fellows, will combine expertise and previously unexamined archives to bring depth and nuance to not only to the specific case of Japanese industrialization, but also more broadly of innovative processes in human past.

1 373 500 €

Start date: 2020-02-01, End date: 2025-01-31

This research project will focus on the area of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated within the People’s Republic of China, and referred to as Kham by Tibetans who make up most of the population of this region divided between the provinces of Sichuan to the east, Yunnan to the south and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the west. This research project intends to explore from a comparative perspective the possible definitions of this entity called Kham, which in the course of history has never strictly corresponded to any administrative unit or coherent whole, and which ultimately should be considered as a land of encounters, a place of métissage (cultural exchanges). By addressing a regional area virtually overlooked by Western research in social science, this project aims to strengthen international academic exchanges and to produce a strong network of collaboration on Kham studies. The multidisciplinary team will undertake ethnographic field studies and documentary research including archival research and contribute fresh, first-hand material to the socio-cultural diversity of Kham. In-depth investigation of the internal diversity of Tibet and its connection with the outside remains sketchy and thus a particular focus of this project is to delve into the complexities of Tibetan society in China. This pioneering work will provide new materials on four complementary cross-disciplinary themes: 1) trade and commerce, 2) ethnicity, religion and local identities, 3) political entities and social organization, and 4) representations and cultural politics, each of which in its own way will improve our understanding of the particular historical, social and political context of the Kham region. Finally, this multi-tiered and multi-scalar approach, with an emphasis on networks, will enhance work on historical mapping, which is still practically non-existent in this region.

651 722 €

Start date: 2012-03-01, End date: 2016-02-29

Migrations are a central issue of the modern period, particularly since World War One. At the same time, the implementation of a systematic policy of categorization, discrimination, persecution, and extermination of European Jews is one of the major events of the first half of the 20th century. How should the relations between these two histories be understood? The goal of this project is to explore the links between migration and the Holocaust from a transnational microhistorical perspective. To this end, it will implement an original method: producing the collective biography of the Jewish inhabitants from the Polish shtetl of Lubartow from the 1920s to the 1950s, whether they emigrated or stayed behind, whether they were exterminated or survived the Holocaust. This research will, for the first time, reconstruct the trajectories of a group of persecution victims across the different places they travelled through, which is possible today thanks to new access to an impressive body of archives and the affordances of the digital humanities. The methodological and archival challenge is immense. This transnational collective biography explores the directions of individual journeys, the diversity of fates, as well as the connections between those who remained and those who left. By doing so, the LUBARTWORLD project addresses some prominent theoretical issues: the dynamics of a social structure drawn into a major disruption, the variability of social categorizations in diverse national and political contexts, and the complex making of identities. From an epistemological point of view, it will develop innovative ways of reconstructing and analyzing life-course information. Although the project begins with Lubartow, it leads to the world in its globality. Lubartow residents crisscrossed the globe, and their trajectories outline and embody in their own way the upheavals of Europe’s relations with the world before, during, and after the Holocaust.

1 985 083 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

Humans can monitor their own mental lives and build representations that contain knowledge about themselves. This capacity to introspect and report one’s own mental states, or in other words “knowing how much one knows”, is termed metacognition. Although metacognition is crucial to behave adequately in a complex environment, metacognitive judgments are often suboptimal. Specifically for neurological and psychiatric diseases, metacognitive failures are highly prevalent, with severe consequences in terms of quality of life. This project proposes a new hypothesis to explain the determining factors of metacognitive failures: namely, that metacognition does not operate in a vacuum but relies on the monitoring of signals from the body, and more specifically, on motor signals involved during action execution. We suggest several experiments to test the motor hypothesis for self-monitoring, and propose a new remediation procedure to resolve metacognitive failures resulting from deficient action monitoring. We will start by assessing the contribution of motor signals to metacognition by identifying the behavioral and neural correlates for detecting self-committed vs. observed errors (WP1), and by using virtual reality and robotics to probe metacognition in a vacuum, operating in the complete absence of voluntary actions (WP2). Finally, we will use these results to develop and evaluate a method to train metacognition in healthy volunteers and individuals with schizophrenia in a bottom-up manner, using online feedback based on motor signals (WP3). This new metacognitive remediation procedure will be performed both in a clinical context and on mobile devices. The goal of this ambitious project is therefore twofold, theoretical in shedding new light on a cognitive process central to our most profound mental states, and clinical in establishing a new remediation method to tackle a major health and societal issue.

1 389 500 €

Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29

A debate in the development of legal institutions is whether individuals obey the law because the law incentivizes or because the law has legitimacy. Much of the PI’s research in law and in development seeks to understand how people form normative commitments, i.e., what people view as the moral and right thing to do, and how they respond to these normative commitments. His work traces the incentives that lead to human rights violations. The PI has examined how interpretations of religious and legal texts, particularly those associated with fundamentalism, interact with market forces. In two multi-part studies, the PI investigated the economic forces underlying the religious provision of social insurance, social sanctions, social conservatism, and the economic incentives that give rise to gender violence, sexual harassment, and regulation of the private domain. Through these investigations, the PI formulated a theory for why church-state separation arose in some countries but not in others, developed a methodology for empirically evaluating the effects of normative commitments, and used a particular instance of interpretive injustice where capital cases in the British Army during World War I were randomly executed or commuted, in order to estimate the deterrent and delegitimizing effects of the death penalty. The proposed project builds on this previous work. The proposal rests on 2 pillars: Normative Commitments in Health Care and Normative Commitments in Courts. Within these 2 pillars, the PI studies the effects of market forces on normative commitments and examines how normative commitments come into existence in the first place. (1) Normative Commitments in Health Care: The PI will measure the influence of pharmaceutical company payments to physicians on their normative commitments. This pillar will evaluate the effects of payments on physician prescriptions and patient outcomes. The pillar will examine whether disclosure laws affect the relationship between payments, prescriptions, and patient outcomes. The pillar will employ a unique U.S. dataset on over 2 billion prescription claims per year on up to 177 million individuals and a Danish database of all prescription drugs sold linked to prescribers with pharmaceutical associations. (2) Normative Commitments in Courts: This pillar will use the random assignment of judges in common law courts to measure the impact of exogenous changes in legal precedent. The pillar will apply a method co-developed by the PI for two-stage least squares estimation (Econometrica (80(6), 2369-2429, 2012) that exploits judicial characteristics as instrumental variables. The pillar will study the effects of 24 legal areas, including capital punishment, free speech, gay rights, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and rights of the disabled. The pillar will use this data to study the origin of rights.

1 591 939 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31

"Jerusalem is undoubtedly one of the cities that receives the most attention from historians, but the available bibliography is plagued, generally speaking, by three major flaws. First, most studies are devoted either to ancient and medieval history, or to the very recent history of the city (after the 1948 War). The Ottoman period (1517-1917) and the British Mandate (1917-1947) are decidedly less studied, as though only the Bible, the Crusades, and then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were worthy of interest. Second, the overwhelming majority of existing studies focus on religious and geopolitical aspects of the city’s history and thus Jerusalem appears either as a jumble of shrines or as a battlefield. The third flaw is the cause of the other two: most Jerusalem historians limit their studies to the history of only one community of the Holy City, thus contributing to the creation of a segmented historical narrative that precludes a more sweeping view of the city. The history of Jerusalem, which is doubtlessly the epitome of the “global city” and should consequently benefit from recent historiographic advances in “connected history”, instead remains one of the most fragmented histories anywhere. As a consequence, the 'citadinité' (“urban citizenship”) shared by the inhabitants of Jerusalem from 1840’s Ottoman’s Reforms to 1940’s War is invisible in the bibliography. Yet truly decompartmentalizing Jersualem’s historiographies means finding ways of interconnecting its archives, a central idea in this project. Supported by an European institution reputed for its stability, this project will distinguish itself through the scientific quality of its research tools and the close attention it pays to local administrative archives. Last but not least, it will not limit itself to a logistical initiative but will scientifically utilize those sources as part of a real intellectual proposal intended to produce a connected history of citadinité in Jerusalem from 1840 to 1940."

1 442 301 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

"Unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity are prevalent notions throughout econometrics. Most of the literature focuses on scalar unobserved heterogeneity. It implies strong restrictions on the heterogeneity of the behaviour of economic agents. This is the case in a binary treatment effect model where scalar unobserved heterogeneity and additive separability of the index in the selection equation are equivalent to the restrictive monotonicity assumption. Nonparametric random coefficients models allow for multiple sources of unobserved heterogeneity and are in line with structural economics. They are also benchmark nonseparable models and can be generalized in various ways. Due to unobserved heterogeneity, but also simultaneity or error in variables, structural models usually involve as well endogenous regressors. Nonparametric models of unobserved heterogeneity and estimation by instrumental variables usually give rise to ill-posed inverse problems. High-dimensional methods are a new set of tools that are increasingly popular in econometrics and allow handling new data configurations with many more potential regressors than observations. They are based on convex relaxation, linear or conic programming ideas, or MCMC algorithms. When the model is well approximated by a parsimonious model where many coefficients are zero they can usually estimate the parameter as well as an oracle who would know the best sparse approximation. They also offer new tools for adaptive nonparametric estimation. Some recent developments are concerned with hidden structured sparsity (structural breakpoints or other patterns other than zeros). This research proposal is on the development of a general framework and new inference tools for flexible models – nonparametric or high-dimensional – with multiple sources of unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity in various models from economics, in particular: programme evaluation, consumer demand, demand for differentiated products, games, etc."

911 388 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31

PrinCE consists of a set of historical, conceptual and critical analyses of the scientific concept of “chemical evolution”. By specifically relying on historical and philosophical methodologies, it aims at shedding new light on the early evolutionary mechanisms mobilised to solve one of the most puzzling scientific problems: that of the origins of life. Endowed with a rich historical legacy, the concept of “chemical evolution” aims at explaining how non-living matter has evolved into living matter on the primitive Earth before the advent of the well-known “biological evolution”. It occupies a central yet controversial place in the scientific debate on the origins of life: for some, it simply is Darwinian evolution applied to chemistry; for others, it consists in radically different evolutionary processes, some of which are just being uncovered now by advances in systems chemistry and in synthetic biology. Yet, despite being a burning question in science, “chemical evolution” has largely been ignored by historians and philosophers of science. It is the aim of PrinCE to fill-in this gap. The project is structured around three methodologically-driven and interwoven sub-projects: (a) a historical-descriptive analysis of the concept of “chemical evolution”, so as to articulate its different construals since the 1850s; (b) a conceptual analysis of “chemical evolution”, especially in light some of the most recent advances in science, so as to elaborate an axiomatic reconstruction of the concept clarifying both units and processes of chemical evolution, and their relationships; (c) a critical analysis of the concept with a view to assessing its justification, its epistemic status as a scientific theory, as well as the modalities of its transition to “biological evolution”. PrinCE will thereby strongly advance our understanding of the very early mechanisms of evolution, of the roots of biological evolution, as well as of the origin and nature of life.

1 452 220 €

Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30

This project aims at transcending boundaries between « high » and « popular » cultures, here established playwrights and anonymous writers, by investigating their productions for a same medium: puppet and marionette theatre. Focusing on key-periods of drama history (1600-2000) it explores how puppeteers and authors both contribute to the raise of a specific dramaturgy. Introducing these repertoires into the history of Western European drama opens a double ground-breaking perspective: on one side, it exceeds the limits of local inquiries and reveals cultural transfers through social groups and nations; on the other, it leads to reexamine theatre historiography by considering the cohesion of “theatrical systems” (Marotti) and giving visibility to a long despised and scatered corpus. The main objectives are 1) to gather a corpus of representative plays which document the development of puppetry in Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Nederlands, Portugal, Spain); 2) to identify the specific features of puppet and marionette plays and their variations through time, cultural areas, conditions of production and targeted audiences; 3) to re-evaluate the contribution of these repertoires to the construction of European cultural identity. The principal investigator brings to this project, besides a long experience of internationally recognized research, an excellent knowledge of artistic and cultural networks which guarantees the access to primary sources as well as the mobilisation of experts and partner institutions. Using digital humanities tools and methods, the project will produce a platform making available the selected corpus through a data base and searchable thesaurus, and offering innovative resources to the research community, pedagogues, practitioners and public at large. The research will lead to a better integration of puppetry into theatre history, an increased knowledge of its heritage, and a growing institutional recognition.

2 288 832 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

To what extent are democratic governments responsive to citizens’ demands and preferences between elections? Are governments more likely to be responsive to the interpretation of public opinion through surveys or to collective and publicly expressed opinion –generally in the form of protests? When does one ore the other type of expression prevail as a mechanism to foster governmental responsiveness? What happens when both forms of expression of the public mood are in clear contradiction? Are certain institutional and political configurations more likely to make governments more responsive to citizens’ views between elections? Are certain political configurations more conducive to governments paying attention to opinion polls while others make them more receptive to collective action claims-making? This project will answer these questions by developing a comparative study of of governmental responsiveness in established democracies between 1980 and 2010. To this purpose, we will discuss the relevant definitions of ‘governmental responsiveness’ and ‘public opinion’, and analyse data from various sources: (i) public opinion surveys, (ii) datasets with information on protest events, (iii) news reports on public moods, collective action, and governmental activity and decision-making, and (iv) comparative indicators on institutional attributes of democratic systems. In terms of the research strategy, the project will combine the analysis of a large number of cases (20 established democracies) with a more detailed study of a set of up to 7 cases. This study will provide a highly innovative approach to the representative link between citizens and governments by comparing the dynamics of democratic representation in decision-making junctures in the periods between elections for which governments cannot invoke an electoral mandate, with the dynamics that emerge in ‘normal’ policy-making situations. The project lies at the intersection of political science and sociology.

1 440 622 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2018-02-28

One of the features of the modern state in its early phase is the development of distinctively political societies: in both Italian cities (from the 12th century) and western monarchies (from the late 13th), exclusively interpersonal links or the arbitral powers of family or social group leaders, although still important, had to compete with other sources of authority. All decisions about justice, war and taxation had to be accepted by those who were directly, and in some cases indirectly, concerned by them. This process, its institutionalisation through representative assemblies and administrative devices, the crises often violent to which it led, has been scrutinized by historians of late. However, scholars have as yet paid little attention to the changes in the communication system which this process implied. They have moved within the limited and well-trodden space of the history of political ideas, running the risk of anachronism by using concepts such as those of propaganda or public opinion. This project is based upon a semiotic hypothesis; it aims at answering three questions, with a specific methodology. The semiotic hypothesis is that, in any society, the communication system has a functional structure similar to that of the language (which is part of it): each component can only be understood in relation with others, in a global and synchronic approach necessary to study the idéel defined by Godelier as a combination of the imaginary and of the symbolic. The questions centre upon the process of legitimization, the concept of acceptance, and the relation of political societies to the components of the communication system. The methodology is based upon comparative history and the use of computing techniques (prosopography, textometrics, statistics).

1 700 000 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2014-03-31