Research Projects

  • ENBE – Education, networks and behavioral economics

    Principal researcher/s: BRAÑAS GARZA, PABLO; CABRALES GOITIA, ANTONIO

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2028

    Project: PID2024-156629NB-I00

    Summary:
    The project aims to address several critical research themes building upon a prior project (DENT). Key objectives include:
    1. Behavior in Educational Centers: Focused on adolescent behavior, this includes finalizing articles and conducting new experiments using datasets like TeensLab. Areas of interest include strategic decision-making, social preferences, and the neurological basis of fairness decisions.
    2. Social Networks and Influence: This examines both positive and negative dimensions of networks among adolescents and adults. Themes include the impact of network position on creativity, social stigmas (e.g., mental health), and theoretical studies on workplace dynamics and crime.
    3. Multi-Country Experiments: Leveraging diverse cultural contexts, projects assess cooperative behavior, environmental awareness, and institutional trust. These efforts aim to unravel the effects of cultural and institutional differences on economic and social behaviors.
    4. Experimental Methodologies: The team focuses on refining experimental economics techniques, including incentives, decision orders, and measurement tools. New real-effort tasks and network-based models are also developed to enhance experimental reliability.
    5. Individual Decision-Making: Topics include the intersection of risk aversion with information acquisition, voting behavior under different mechanisms, and understanding social and political preference interactions.
    The proposal emphasizes open science practices, ensuring data and tools are accessible for replication and further exploration. Additionally, it plans high-impact dissemination through publications, conferences, and policy engagements. The project is poised to contribute substantially to economic, social, and behavioral sciences while addressing pressing societal challenges like mental health stigma, crime, and climate resilience.
    For education, findings will directly impact school-level decision-making, improving social integration and addressing bullying and cognitive development. A dedicated web platform supports schools in accessing student performance data and research insights.

  • CulturaEconomía – Cultura, Instituciones y Economía

    Principal researcher/s: ORTUÑO, IGNACIO I.; MARHUENDA, FRANCISCO

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2028

    Project: PID2024-161056NB-I00

    Summary:
    Our research proposal contains several themes, but they all have common aspects. In all cases, economic questions are analyzed where culture plays a role. The first theme is about measures of social division and polarization. New ways of measuring polarization and empirically studying its evolution in a series of countries are proposed. The next theme is cultural differences between men and women using social media data. The third research theme concerns the role of cultural differences between regions in understanding secessionism. Data from 3000 regions in the world are used. The fourth theme is about intergenerational socioeconomic mobility. Specifically, it measures the importance of transmitting cultural values within the family in intergenerational mobility. Censuses from several countries will be used.

  • Using Dutch Medical School Lottery Outcomes – Using Dutch Medical School Lottery Outcomes to Estimate the Effect of Personal Access to Medical Expertise on Vaccine Hesitancy and the Effect of Becoming a Physician on the Risk of Suicide

    Principal researcher/s: REES, DANIEL IRA

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2028

    Project: PID2024-157918NB-I00

    Summary:
    Until 1999, the Dutch Minister of Education set strict limits on the number of high school graduates allowed to study medicine; an annual, centralized lottery was conducted to determine which applicants to medical school were accepted. Leveraging the outcomes of Dutch medical school lotteries conducted during the period 1987-1999, our goal is to answer the following questions:
    Can personal access to medical expertise overcome vaccine hesitancy?
    Does becoming a physician increase the risk of suicide?
    These questions, both of which are causal, will be answered with administrative data from Statistics Netherlands. To our knowledge, neither of these questions has, to date, been adequately addressed by previous researchers. This proposal is part of an ongoing collaborative research effort with Drs. D. Mark Anderson (Montana State University) and Ron Diris (Leiden University).

  • TEDMEMO – Teoría Económica Dinámica: Métodos y Modelos de la Macro y de las Finanzas IV

    Principal researcher/s: RINCON ZAPATERO, JUAN PABLO; JOSA FOMBELLIDA, RICARDO

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2029

    Project: PID2024-161721NB-I00

    Summary:
    This project comprises two interlinked research proposals: understanding economic agents’ intertemporal decisions and designing active-participant pension plans. Both delve into dynamic models. The first proposal explores questions related to stochastic dynamic programming and the Koopmans equation in recursive utility theory. Additionally, we will investigate the design of aggregated defined benefit pension plans of the employment system and analyze a dynamic game between fund managers and participants.

  • ICB – Immigration and Collective Bargaining

    Principal researcher/s: STUHLER, JAN LEONARD

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2029

    Project: PID2024-162138NB-I00

    Summary:
    In this project, we study how immigration and the collective bargaining (CB) system interact and affect each other. The project has both a theoretical and an empirical component.
    On the theoretical side, we formulate a model of firm wage setting that incorporates collective bargaining. Collective agreements restrict firms’ wage-setting power, but firms may also avoid this system by opting out (as is possible in some countries) or through other mechanisms. Economic shocks, such as immigration, may therefore affect not only wages but also whether firms opt into CB agreements and the content of those agreements.
    Empirically, we study whether recent immigration waves in Spain and Germany have affected wage floors stipulated in collective contracts, and whether the existence of such wage floors alters the wage effects of immigration. This analysis is based on high-quality administrative data that allow us to track workers and firms over time, and to exploit regional and sectoral variation in immigration for causal identification.
    Our starting hypothesis is that immigration (or similar economic shocks) and the CB system interact in multiple ways. First, CB agreements may constrain or alter the wage impacts of immigration. Second, immigration may affect the probability that firms opt into or out of CB agreements. Third, immigration may influence wage floors and wage growth through its effects on newly negotiated CB agreements. A corollary of the second and third hypotheses is that immigration may contribute to the erosion of CB systems—an implication that we also test empirically.
    Although immigration and collective bargaining are central economic topics in many countries, there is little empirical evidence on these interactions. Existing research has identified other factors that may have contributed to the weakening of collective bargaining systems in Germany, Spain, and other European countries, including exposure to foreign competition and rising heterogeneity in productivity across firms and workers (e.g., Jäger, Noy, and Schoefer, 2022). In contrast, the literature has largely overlooked how immigration interacts with collective bargaining. A recent exception is Medici (2025), who shows, using historical U.S. data, that immigration was an important driver of unionization in the early twentieth century. However, we still lack evidence on how—and through which mechanisms—immigration affects CB systems in modern economies.

  • FRICHET-DLM – FRICTIONS AND HETEROGENEITY IN DYNAMIC LABOUR MARKETS

    Principal researcher/s: VISSCHERS, LODEWIJK P.

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2028

    Project: PID2024-160896OB-I00

    Summary:
    The main contribution of this research proposal is improved measurement of heterogeneous sectoral (industry/occupation) reallocation frictions that workers face, based on a new search-theoretical framework that uses sectoral vacancy data in combination with worker flows across sectors. It distinguishes reallocation frictions that are specific between source/destination pairs from sector-specific push and pull forces. This has implications for the measurement of labor market shortages and mismatch, and beyond this, for policies to facilitate a societally more desirable allocation of labor.
    The research in this project delves deeper by using this framework to compare the size of sector-pair specific reallocation frictions across countries. This can be further used to measure the different labor market shortages and mismatch across countries and the underlying sources (different frictions, different sectoral distribution of workers or different sectoral push/pull factors). It will consider the role of sectoral and occupational miscoding that is relevant for standard labor force data. It will also relate the reallocation frictions as measured to observed flows and occupational task content.

  • WFG3CON – Workers, firms, and governments: Connected through uncertainty and frictions

    Principal researcher/s: YURDAGUL, EMIRCAN; WELLSCHMIED, FELIX M.

    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN (AEI)

    Start date: 01/09/2025

    End date: 31/08/2029

    Project: PID2024-158085NB-I00

    Summary:
    Income risk, stemming from idiosyncratic shocks or aggregate shocks, affects the lived experiences of almost all workers at some point in their lives. As private markets are mostly missing, governments provide the majority of insurance against those risks. This project will advance our scientific knowledge about the nature of these risks and effective insurance measures by the government. Regarding idiosyncratic risk, we will study the hardships resulting from job insecurity, low wages, and health risks affecting the type of work one can do. We will place a special emphasis on how the government can incentivize firms to create good jobs, thus, furthering our understanding of how to create stable and well-paying employment which has been identified as a key goal by the UN through its Sustainable Development Goals and the European Union through the Eurofound Agency. Moreover, we will study how the government can insure workers effectively against idiosyncratic income risks. With regard to aggregate shocks, governments abilities to insure workers against risk are particularly strained during periods of sovereign debt crises. Yet worse, these events are usually accompanied by deep economic recessions. For example, during the 2010 financial crisis, millions of people became unemployed in Europe and people in countries that saw rising interest rates were the most affected. This project will contribute to understanding the causes of these large macroeconomic shocks, their consequences for employment, and possible mitigation measures.

  • CLIMAD-CM – Efectos Económicos y Sociales de las Políticas Climáticas y Energéticas

    Principal researcher/s: Paraskevi Pappa

    Funding entity: COMUNIDAD DE MADRID

    Start date: 01/01/2025

    End date: 31/12/2027

    Project: PHS-2024/PH-HUM-126

    Summary:
    The CLIMAD-CM project (“Economic and Social Effects of Climate and Energy Policies”) aims to develop and apply advanced methodologies to evaluate the design of climate and energy policies and their socio-economic impacts. The analysis will be carried out through an interdisciplinary approach, combining knowledge from various fields of economics (Microeconomics, Microeconometrics, Macroeconomics, Political Economy) to comprehensively address the challenges of climate change and the Energy Transition.
    The first line of research will focus on analyzing policies to promote renewable energy. It will seek to identify the most suitable market mechanisms and public policies to boost investments in renewable energy. Two elements will play a prominent role in the analysis, which will be both theoretical and empirical: long-term contracts and their ability to reduce uncertainty about cost recovery, and renewable energy auctions which, if well designed, will be an effective mechanism to allow consumers to benefit from the efficiency gains, while ensuring the achievement of the renewable energy investments.
    The second line of research will explore the socio-economic and demographic effects of green investments, developing a novel methodological framework to analyze the heterogeneity of the effects of climate and energy policies. Additionally, the impact of renewable energy investments on migration flows and population in rural areas will be evaluated, identifying how these investments can mitigate depopulation.
    The third line of research will address the macroeconomic effects of the Energy Transition. The aggregate and distributive impacts of climate volatility and energy price shocks on income and employment will be analyzed, using high-frequency long-term data. Additionally, the effects of the Energy Transition on small open economies will be studied, developing models that include clean and polluting energies as substitutive production inputs.
    The fourth line of research will examine the political economy of the Energy Transition and green taxation. The implications of policies that promote the Energy Transition will be analyzed, focusing on environmental taxation and its distributive impact. Additionally, incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles and the determinants of discourse around green public policies in the Congress of Deputies will be studied.
    This project stands out for its interdisciplinary value, integrating approaches from various fields of economics to address climate change and the Energy Transition. It will enable the creation of a leading research group on these topics in the Community of Madrid, fostering close collaboration among members of the three research groups involved: ENERGYECOLAB (UC3M), CEMFI, and CUNEF. This group will work in collaboration with national and international institutions, providing knowledge and methodological developments that will be highly useful for public policy formulation.

  • El desarrollo de las finanzas digitales: Oráculos descentralizados para un sistema financiero descentralizado

    Principal researcher/s: HERNANDO VECIANA, ANGEL; ESCUDERO LIEBANA, CARLOS
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/12/2022
    End date: 30/11/2024
    Type: Nacional Project. TED-Transición ecológica y digital
    Summary: This project focus on digital transition by building up and improving current components of the decentralized digital finance infrastructure. Two goals are pursued: to improve on blockchain reporting of digital financial information through the work on financial automated market making schemes; and to use developing decentralized infrastructure to create a system of reporting digitally and in a decentralized form benchmark indexes to ameliorate their transparency and resilience. This approach addresses three main themes emphasised by the most recent legal initiatives in the EU: (A) The need to better access to data and data sharing within the EU, creating broader access to public and private data to the benefits of people, businesses, and public interest. (B) Clarify regulation, allowing the financial sector to capture efficiency gains through wider use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in capital markets. (C) Embrace crypto asset development in order to be part of the recent growth in decentralized finance.
    Our proposal will work around these three main themes with a clear and well-defined objective: design and build incentive compatibles mechanisms that will allow to link off chain with the on-chain economy. The solution to this problem comes in the form of oracles or reporters of the outside world. This is a key step for the transition to the digital economy and the future of finance and one of the most relevant problems in Decentralised Finance. We will link the reliability and proper functioning of oracles to problems currently faced in centralized economy: accurate and reliable reporting of benchmark data, like those encountered in the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate). The project will move into the implementation of a proof of concept in the form of a reliable DLT that reports benchmark data. To address this objective, we shall draw two big research lines. In our first research line, we focus on improving on the design of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) with the view of employing them as on-chain Oracles for input data for benchmarks. This big research line is to be tackled with an interdisciplinary approach around four research topics: (1) Mathematical modelling to assess the robustness of AMM as on chain oracles building on the work of Grunspan and Perez-Marco based on Markov chains. (2) Focus on a particular AMM, Constant Function Market Makers and study how to improve their reliability as oracles in particular with respect to insider information and front running. (3) Improving on-chain oracles through cross-AMM/cross-chain collaboration, in particular with respect to multiple liquidity pools. (4) Improving on the design of on-chain oracles using the tools of mechanism design and market microstructure. The former more naturally connected to the first two topics in this list, and the latter to the third one.
    The developments in this first research line are to be carried to a second research line focused on the development of a framework to construct financial benchmarks akin to the LIBOR but based on the decentralised methodology of blockchain oracles.

    Project: TED2021-131844B-I00

  • CAMBIO CLIMATICO HETEROGENEO

    Principal researcher/s: GONZALO MUÑOZ, JESUS; GADEA RIVAS, MARIA DOLORES
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/12/2022
    End date: 30/11/2024
    Type: Nacional Project. TED-Transición ecológica y digital.
    Summary: The main goal of this project is a full analysis (detection, prediction, causes and consequences) of Climate Change Heterogeneity (CCH). The existence of CCH enforces that the mitigation policies should follow a common factor structure: (i) global measures to mitigate the common global warming and (ii) extra idiosyncratic or regional measures to reduce the local warming.
    The Green Transition is underpinned by several environmental objectives such as CC mitigation and adaptation to it. But a prerequisite for achieving these goals is an accurate understanding of the nature, causes and consequences, past, present and future, of the CC phenomenon. This knowledge will support environmental policies, aimed at increasing the resilience of the productive sectors, the protection of natural resources and the improvement of the quality of life of people and society in general. In this frame, the contribution of this project is twofold. On the one hand, it represents an advance in scientific knowledge, in this case on the phenomenon of CC. And secondly, it provides empirical applications for the design of policies to mitigate its effects at a local level. In the case of Spain, and within the objectives of the first axis of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, establishing its climate change typology, identifying the vulnerabilities of its natural resources and its productive structure, its specific risks, and the future dynamic of the regional CC. This project proposes a novel approach to analyze the first three of the big four factors that make CC problem so difficult to solve: It is almost uniquely global, uniquely long-term, uniquely uncertain and uniquely irreversible. Given that analysis based on the average temperature is not appropriate for understanding and solving this problem, we hope our robust empirical results, based on the construction of models for realized-observed quantiles (RQ) of the temperature distribution and on quantile factor models (QFM) to obtain the latent factors that drive the whole temperature distribution, give enough insights for the design of efficient mitigation policies that lessen the irreversibility factor.

    Project: TED2021-129784B-I00

  • Políticas para la transición energética: precios del carbono, energías renovables y almacenamiento energético

    Principal researcher/s: FABRA PORTELA, NATALIA
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/12/2022
    End date: 30/11/2024
    Type: Nacional Project. TED-Transición ecológica y digital
    Summary: Our project aims to contribute to the frontier of energy and climate policy research, placing particular emphasis on the analysis of energy and climate policies. We will develop new models based in economic theory, and we will also rely on cutting-edge empirical tools to shed light on three main lines of research: (1). A framework to assess energy and climate policies; (2). The distributional implications of carbon pricing; (3). The future of electricity markets: renewables and energy storage.
    Existing frameworks for evaluation of policy options are typically focused on maximizing economic efficiency. In Research Line 1, we aim to extend this literature by building a theoretical framework that allows one to balance several objectives: cost efficiency, effectiveness, feasibility, credibility, and fairness. Our framework will help to answer questions, such as: how can countries find the right balance between these objectives? Which are the best available policy options to achieve them? What are the right criteria to evaluate the various policy options? How should we quantitatively and qualitatively assess their merits?
    The feasibility and success of energy and climate policies thus critically hinges on their distributional implications. Research Line 2 specifically aims to evaluate the effectiveness and distributional implications of carbon pricing, providing insights on how to design equitable and politically acceptable policies and compensation schemes. For these purposes, we will be using household-level consumption data from the universe of (anonymized) transactions mediated by BBVA to measure the degree of carbon footprint inequality across different social groups, as well the contribution of different consumption categories to total GHG emissions. In particular, we will identify which consumption categories are quantitatively more relevant for top emitters, and we will explore the relationship between households carbon footprints and their income (proxied by their expenditures if income sources are not available). We will compute expenditure elasticities (i.e., how expenditure in a consumption category changes with a unit change in total expenditure) to understand which polluting goods are necessities and which ones are not. This would help identify sectors in which carbon pricing has strong potential for changing behaviour towards environment-friendly consumption. Finally, we will analyse the individual and socio-economic determinants behind the observed differences in carbon footprints. We also propose to characterize and quantify the distributive effects of revenue-recycling mechanisms that redistribute carbon taxes according to different criteria.

    Proyect: TED2021-129678B-I00

  • Explaining the Black-White Infant Mortality Gap in the United States

    Principal researcher/s: REES , DANIEL IRA
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: PID2021-128955NB-I00

  • GREEN AND DIGITAL FINANCE – Supporting medium-sized companies through open source tools in their energy and digital transformations.

    Principal researcher/s: FABRA PORTELA, NATALIA
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: CPP2021-008644

  • Entender y abordar los desafíos políticos contemporáneos

    Principal researcher/s: PAPPA , PARASKEVI
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project:  PID2021-122931NB-I00

  • Inferencias en Modelos Econométricos de Alta Dimensión.

    Principal researcher/s: ESCANCIANO REYERO, JUAN CARLOS
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: PID2021-127794NB-I00

  • Diseño de Mecanismos y diseño de «Benchmarks»

    Principal researcher/s: HERNANDO VECIANA, ANGEL
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: PID2021-124118NB-I00

  • Especificación y Validación de Modelos Econométricos

    Principal researcher/s: DELGADO GONZALEZ, MIGUEL ANGEL
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: PID2021-125178NB-I00

  • Información asimétrica: teoría y práctica

    Principal researcher/s: FUCHS SCHUARZBERG, WILLIAM MARTIN
    Funding entity: AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION (AEI)
    Start date: 01/09/2022
    End date: 31/08/2026
    Type: Nacional project
    Project: PID2021-128990NB-I00

  • Flujos de empleo y empleo temporal en España

    Investigador/es principal/es: WELLSCHMIED, FELIX
    Entidad financiadora: Contratos con Entidades Privadas. (Fundación Ramón Areces)
    Fecha inicio: 04/11/2022
    Fecha fin: 3/11/2025
    Convocatoria: Programa Nacional

See the Competitive State Plan Projects

en_USEnglish
es_ESSpanish en_USEnglish