Innovative Training Network ‘Expectations and Social Influence Dynamics in Economics’ (ExSIDE)

Expectations play a crucial role in determining the behaviour of many economic decision makers. The recent financial and economic crisis has highlighted the importance of expectation dynamics for economic development, the success of firm strategies and public policies. The Innovative Training Network ExSIDE aims at improving our understanding of the role of expectation formation and social influence for economic dynamics and for the optimal design of economic policy. This agenda will be pursued by combining an interdisciplinary research agenda with an innovative European joint doctoral training programme, which provides Early Stage Researchers with a broad range of expertise and skills needed for a thorough analysis of expectation formation processes and their role in Economics. Both the research projects and the training activities will combine work in Behavioural Economics, Psychoanalysis, Opinion Formation, Network Theory, Agentbased Simulation and Economic Modelling in different areas. The academic training will be complemented by extensive Transferable Skills Training Measures, Inter-Sectoral Training Measures, provided by non-academic partners, and Career Development Training.

AXA Research Fund Post-doc scholarship: Cognitive biases, perceived wealth and macroeconomic instability.

Principal Investigator: Alberto Cardaci. The project will start in September 2017 and will last 2 years.

The research project combines a series of empirical experiments and a theoretical macroeconomic agent-based model. Based on recent findings from behavioral economics and social cognitive psychology, the research introduces the construct of perceived wealth, which identifies a biased perception of individual net worth, whose value deviates from the actual value of wealth. By means of laboratory experiments, it investigates how perceived wealth leads individuals to make non-optimal consumption and borrowing decisions that result in large household debt accumulation. Eventually, macro ABM is developed in order to evaluate the macroeconomic implications of such individual behaviour. 

Integrated Macro-Financial Modelling for Robust Policy Design

In this project 11 European Universities collaborate with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in a consortium of experienced researchers in the field of macro- and financial economics, supported by an advisory board of influential academics of the highest worldwide reputation and policy makers at central banks and finance ministries. The three-year project (2014-2017) is funded by the European Commissionand brings together different lines of research to systematically develop new behavioural and institutional model building blocks, to integrate such features in policy-focused models and to make use of these models in a new framework for policy evaluation.

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Macro-Risk Assessment and Stabilization Policies with New Early Warning Signals

The Rastanews project aims at answering the following questions:

- how the evolving system of economic governance in the EU (including the implementation of the common monetary policy, mechanisms of economic policy coordination and the system of financial market supervision) is likely to affect economic stability in the Union and in individual Member States, taking into account the risks involved and the challenge of solving the debt problem;

- how the evolving system of economic governance is likely to work in practice, given the complex inter-institutional setting which might combine Community and intergovernmental efforts. The research should analyse the integration of the decision making processes of economic governance in Europe and the roles of actors involved at national and EU levels;

-what risks the EU (or the Member States) should absorb, and how the institutional framework can respond to these risks and find solid systemic solutions, including potential debt restructuring;

-how should the relations between the Eurozone countries and other EU Member States be improved, especially in the context of deepening macro-economic integration in the Eurozone

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Complexity Research Initiative for Systemic Instabilities

The global financial crisis destroyed the faith that both policymakers and the general public had in the traditional economic models and thinking that had failed to foresee the disaster. The CRISIS project aims to fill that gap by developing a new approach to economic modelling and understanding risks and instabilities in the global economy and financial system.

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Monetary, Fiscal and Structural Policies with Heterogeneous Agents

The POLHIA project has been financed through Theme 8 of the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities). It is a 3 years project started in November 1, 2008. It is a research project conducted with the collaboration of six European Institutions:

POLHIA's core scope consists in exploring the nexus of macroeconomic and microeconomic/structural policies in an heterogeneous agents setting. 

POLHIA aims at providing new insights and useful suggestions for the implementation of both macroeconomic policies and structural policies and for rethinking policy coordination or coherence, which emerges first between monetary and fiscal policies and second between micro and macro policies.

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