Paolo Surico awarded 1 million research grant

London Business School Professor of Economics Paolo Surico has been awarded a £1 million grant from UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.

The grant will fund a 36-month research project on the ‘Long-Run Consequences of Business-Cycle Fluctuations’.

Professor Surico’s work comes at a time of low economic growth in the UK, characterised by rising inequality and uneven performance.

However, most of the policies under current consideration by governments and central banks around the world are designed as short-term stabilisation tools for the whole economy, and little is known about the distributional consequences of these policies over the longer-term.

Professor Surico will study the channels through which stabilisation policies and business-cycle fluctuations are likely to have longer-lasting effects than previously thought on the aggregate economy and across different groups of society, through the interlinkages between household and firm heterogeneity.

Describing the significance of the project, Professor Surico said: “We are in very difficult economic times characterised by high inflation, low economic growth and dismal productivity record. The ambition of this research agenda is to join the dots of these seemingly unrelated issues by showing how interest rate policies, tax changes and government spending can have a significant impact on standards of living also in the long-run, and not just over the business-cycle.

“It is exciting to work on these fascinating topics with a dream team of students and colleagues at London Business School,” he said.