Bocconi is the Recipient of 5 Million Euro European Research Grants

THANKS TO FIVE PROJECTS FINANCED BY THE EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL IN 2011: THREE STARTING GRANTS AND TWO ADVANCED GRANTS

With five projects financed by the European Research Council (ERC) in 2011, Università Bocconi has been granted € 4,965,000 for its research in social sciences and a place among the top-tier research universities.

The five Bocconi projects are one third of the 15 projects by Italian universities financed in 2011 in the “social sciences and humanities” field by ERC, the flagship component of the Ideas Programme of the European Union's Seventh Research Framework Programme. Bocconi success rate has been 55.5% (five financed projects out of nine presented), to be compared to the 9.3% for the overall “social sciences and humanities” field (142 financed projects all around Europe out of 1,528 presented).

More in depth, Bocconi received three Starting Grants, i.e. grants to younger researchers, out of four presented, and two Advanced Grants, reserved to more experienced academics, out of five.

The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence. Since 2008, when ERC granted its funding for the first time, its grants have been the benchmark for European research universities.

The five Bocconi projects financed in 2011 add to four other projects financed in the last few years, “for a total of nine projects”, rector Guido Tabellini says, “comparable, in our field of academic interest, to the best European competitors’”.

Guido Alfani, with the project Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800; Alessia Melegaro, with the project The Impact of Demographic Changes on Infectious Diseases Transmission and Control in Middle/Low Income Countries, and Tommaso Monacelli, with the project Financial Imperfections and Macroeconomic Implications are the Starting Grants recipients; Maristella Botticini, with the project Contracts, Institutions and Markets in Historical Perspective, and Marco Ottaviani, with the project Designing Institutions to Evaluate Ideas, are the Advanced Grants winners.

by Fabio Todesco