Professors Robin Burgess and Silvana Tenreyo
Professors Robin Burgess and Silvana Tenreyo from the Department of Economics at LSE have been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants. They are among 255 outstanding research leaders this year to have been awarded what is some of the EU’s most competitive funding by the ERC.
Professor Robin Burgess, Department of Economics was awarded ERC funding for his project, Innovation and the Environment.
Professor Burgess, said: “It is becoming ever more apparent that the way out of the tension between growth and climate change is innovation. These innovations will not only have to slow the emissions that are driving climate change but also protect people from the unfolding damages. This project will shed light on three major questions: (1) how can we enhance resilience to climate change?; (2) how can we design smart conservation policies?; and (3) how can we promote innovation and diffusion of clean energy?
The support of the ERC is transformational as it helps to catalyse a movement to place environmental issues at the heart of economics and economic policy. Doing this is critical to bringing human activity and the natural environment into greater balance and is central to the future or our planet. Pushing this movement forward will require collaborations with a range of organisations and researchers. I am deeply deeply grateful to the support that the ERC is has provided to me over the years and am excited to take this work forward.”
Professor Silvana Tenreyo, Department of Economics, will receive funding for her project, Challenges to Current Monetary Policy Thinking: New quantitative frameworks and empirics.
Professor Tenreyo, said: “I am delighted and deeply grateful to receive the ERC grant. The support from ERC grant will be crucial to carry out this project, which will entail the collaboration with many other researchers and PhD students.
The recent sequence of extraordinary shocks and the prospect of more frequent supply shocks caused by geopolitical or climate-related events have ignited the debate over how macroeconomic policy should prepare and respond in the future. The main objective of this project is to develop quantitative frameworks suitable for the evaluation and analysis of macroeconomic policy in this fast changing global environment. The first strand studies macroeconomic policy in times of crisis that could be triggered by climate change or geopolitical events, causing shortages in critical inputs. The second strand focuses on policy transmission lags–the time taken between a policy action and its economic effects-- and studies how best to conduct policy in settings with long and imprecise lags. The third strand zooms in on a key question for monetary policy effectiveness in emerging (and some advanced) economies: the conduct and effectiveness of monetary policy in a world of dollar dominance.”
The grants will support leading research in fields ranging from life sciences and physical sciences to social sciences and humanities. Targeting established and leading researchers, the competition attracted 1,829 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Nearly fourteen percent of proposals were selected for funding. Estimates show that the grants will create 2,480 jobs in teams of new grantees.
The new ERC grants total nearly €652 million are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The European Commision and the UK Government have reached an agreement on the association of the UK to Horizon Europe for the 2024 budget and onward.