LBS professor awarded £1m European grant

Paolo Surico, Professor of Economics at London Business School, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant worth €1,135,940 (£1,002,984) from the European Research Council (ERC) over a period of four years.

This is Professor Surico’s third ERC award at the School. He has previously been awarded Starting and Consolidator grants.

“I am extremely honoured to be offered further funding to continue my research agenda through yet another award from this very prestigious and highly competitive scheme,” he said. “The challenge of (re)thinking about the distributional effects of macroeconomic policies in the aggregate economy is huge. I am thrilled by the opportunity the ERC and London Business School have given me to uncover this relatively overlooked aspect of macroeconomics”.

The ERC evaluated 2,538 research proposals under this round, of which 13% were funded. The ERC aims to stimulate scientific excellence by supporting and encouraging the very best and truly creative scientists, scholars and engineers to be adventurous and take risks in their research.

Professor Surico’s research focuses on assessing the aggregate effects and distributional impact of large public programme interventions such as government spending and tax reforms, monetary policy and macroprudential regulation, giving particular emphasis to the role played by households’ and firms’ debt in the transmission mechanism.

The project will revisit fundamental issues in the analysis of business cycles by looking at the effects of monetary policy and macro-prudential regulation on financial conditions, and through these on consumption, housing and investment by redistributing resources across households and firms.