Project acronym 1st-principles-discs
Project A First Principles Approach to Accretion Discs
Researcher (PI) Martin Elias Pessah
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Country Denmark
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE9, ERC-2012-StG_20111012
Summary Most celestial bodies, from planets, to stars, to black holes; gain mass during their lives by means of an accretion disc. Understanding the physical processes that determine the rate at which matter accretes and energy is radiated in these discs is vital for unraveling the formation, evolution, and fate of almost every type of object in the Universe. Despite the fact that magnetic fields have been known to be crucial in accretion discs since the early 90’s, the majority of astrophysical questions that depend on the details of how disc accretion proceeds are still being addressed using the “standard” accretion disc model (developed in the early 70’s), where magnetic fields do not play an explicit role. This has prevented us from fully exploring the astrophysical consequences and observational signatures of realistic accretion disc models, leading to a profound disconnect between observations (usually interpreted with the standard paradigm) and modern accretion disc theory and numerical simulations (where magnetic turbulence is crucial). The goal of this proposal is to use several complementary approaches in order to finally move beyond the standard paradigm. This program has two main objectives: 1) Develop the theoretical framework to incorporate magnetic fields, and the ensuing turbulence, into self-consistent accretion disc models, and investigate their observational implications. 2) Investigate transport and radiative processes in collision-less disc regions, where non-thermal radiation originates, by employing a kinetic particle description of the plasma. In order to achieve these goals, we will use, and build upon, state-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamic and particle-in-cell codes in conjunction with theoretical modeling. This framework will make it possible to address fundamental questions on stellar and planet formation, binary systems with a compact object, and supermassive black hole feedback in a way that has no counterpart within the standard paradigm.
Summary
Most celestial bodies, from planets, to stars, to black holes; gain mass during their lives by means of an accretion disc. Understanding the physical processes that determine the rate at which matter accretes and energy is radiated in these discs is vital for unraveling the formation, evolution, and fate of almost every type of object in the Universe. Despite the fact that magnetic fields have been known to be crucial in accretion discs since the early 90’s, the majority of astrophysical questions that depend on the details of how disc accretion proceeds are still being addressed using the “standard” accretion disc model (developed in the early 70’s), where magnetic fields do not play an explicit role. This has prevented us from fully exploring the astrophysical consequences and observational signatures of realistic accretion disc models, leading to a profound disconnect between observations (usually interpreted with the standard paradigm) and modern accretion disc theory and numerical simulations (where magnetic turbulence is crucial). The goal of this proposal is to use several complementary approaches in order to finally move beyond the standard paradigm. This program has two main objectives: 1) Develop the theoretical framework to incorporate magnetic fields, and the ensuing turbulence, into self-consistent accretion disc models, and investigate their observational implications. 2) Investigate transport and radiative processes in collision-less disc regions, where non-thermal radiation originates, by employing a kinetic particle description of the plasma. In order to achieve these goals, we will use, and build upon, state-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamic and particle-in-cell codes in conjunction with theoretical modeling. This framework will make it possible to address fundamental questions on stellar and planet formation, binary systems with a compact object, and supermassive black hole feedback in a way that has no counterpart within the standard paradigm.
Max ERC Funding
1 793 697 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31
Project acronym HHPOLITICS
Project A Household Finance Theory of Political Attitudes and Political Behavior
Researcher (PI) David Dreyer Lassen
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Country Denmark
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 Kjaer
Host Institution (HI) COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL
Country Denmark
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 Soegaard
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Country Denmark
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
Country Denmark
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 NanoTrigger
Project Triggerable nanomaterials to modulate cell activity
Researcher (PI) Lino Da Silva Ferreira
Host Institution (HI) CENTRO DE NEUROCIENCIAS E BIOLOGIACELULAR ASSOCIACAO
Country Portugal
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE8, ERC-2012-StG_20111012
Summary The advent of molecular reprogramming and the associated opportunities for personalised and therapeutic medicine requires the development of novel systems for on-demand delivery of reprogramming factors into cells in order to modulate their activity/identity. Such triggerable systems should allow precise control of the timing, duration, magnitude and spatial release of the reprogramming factors. Furthermore, the system should allow this control even in vivo, using non-invasive means. The present project aims at developing triggerable systems able to release efficiently reprogramming factors on demand. The potential of this technology will be tested in two settings: (i) in the reprogramming of somatic cells in vitro, and (ii) in the improvement of hematopoietic stem cell engraftment in vivo, at the bone marrow. The proposed research involves a team formed by engineers, chemists, biologists and is highly multidisciplinary in nature encompassing elements of engineering, chemistry, system biology, stem cell technology and nanomedicine.
Summary
The advent of molecular reprogramming and the associated opportunities for personalised and therapeutic medicine requires the development of novel systems for on-demand delivery of reprogramming factors into cells in order to modulate their activity/identity. Such triggerable systems should allow precise control of the timing, duration, magnitude and spatial release of the reprogramming factors. Furthermore, the system should allow this control even in vivo, using non-invasive means. The present project aims at developing triggerable systems able to release efficiently reprogramming factors on demand. The potential of this technology will be tested in two settings: (i) in the reprogramming of somatic cells in vitro, and (ii) in the improvement of hematopoietic stem cell engraftment in vivo, at the bone marrow. The proposed research involves a team formed by engineers, chemists, biologists and is highly multidisciplinary in nature encompassing elements of engineering, chemistry, system biology, stem cell technology and nanomedicine.
Max ERC Funding
1 699 320 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2017-10-31
Project acronym Universal Banking
Project Universal Banking, Corporate Control and Crises
Researcher (PI) Miguel Luis Sousa De Almeida Ferreira
Host Institution (HI) FACULDADE DE ECONOMIA DA UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA
Country Portugal
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH1, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary Financial intermediaries play a vital role in providing capital to corporations. The 2007-2009 financial crisis had dramatic consequences on the organization of the financial system that led to the rise of universal banking and financial conglomerates. Financial conglomerates have been common in Europe, but the recent developments have eroded the separation of commercial and investment banking elsewhere. Financial conglomerates act as lenders but also underwrite and trade securities, have equity stakes and sit on the board of corporations, and manage mutual and pension funds that invest in corporations. These forms of corporate control by financial conglomerates are distinct in their incentives and costs and therefore can have distinct effects on non-financial corporations. We will study the effect of control by financial conglomerates on corporation’s performance, investment, financing, and corporate governance policies. A particular relevant channel through which financial conglomerates can affect firm’s policies is the credit channel. Firms establish relationships with financial conglomerates that give easier access to credit and potentially at a lower cost due to economies of scale in information collection and monitoring. There may be, however, costs to firms with a close relationship with a financial conglomerate as firms may be locked up due to an information monopoly. We will study the effects of bank-firm relationships on the loan market. In particular, we will examine the importance of these relationships for explaining differences in the cost of bank distress across firms. The hypothesis is that strong ties with banks reduce firms’ ability to substitute relationship bank loans with other sources of external finance, and therefore firms with stronger relationships could experience greater costs during financial crises. We will contribute to the understanding the consequences of shocks to the financial health of banks for nonfinancial firms.
Summary
Financial intermediaries play a vital role in providing capital to corporations. The 2007-2009 financial crisis had dramatic consequences on the organization of the financial system that led to the rise of universal banking and financial conglomerates. Financial conglomerates have been common in Europe, but the recent developments have eroded the separation of commercial and investment banking elsewhere. Financial conglomerates act as lenders but also underwrite and trade securities, have equity stakes and sit on the board of corporations, and manage mutual and pension funds that invest in corporations. These forms of corporate control by financial conglomerates are distinct in their incentives and costs and therefore can have distinct effects on non-financial corporations. We will study the effect of control by financial conglomerates on corporation’s performance, investment, financing, and corporate governance policies. A particular relevant channel through which financial conglomerates can affect firm’s policies is the credit channel. Firms establish relationships with financial conglomerates that give easier access to credit and potentially at a lower cost due to economies of scale in information collection and monitoring. There may be, however, costs to firms with a close relationship with a financial conglomerate as firms may be locked up due to an information monopoly. We will study the effects of bank-firm relationships on the loan market. In particular, we will examine the importance of these relationships for explaining differences in the cost of bank distress across firms. The hypothesis is that strong ties with banks reduce firms’ ability to substitute relationship bank loans with other sources of external finance, and therefore firms with stronger relationships could experience greater costs during financial crises. We will contribute to the understanding the consequences of shocks to the financial health of banks for nonfinancial firms.
Max ERC Funding
1 174 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-03-01, End date: 2018-02-28
