European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants have been awarded to four LSE academics within the Department of Economics and the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). Professors Nava Ashraf, Benjamin Moll, Mark Schankerman and Johannes Spinnewijn have all been awarded the highly competitive grants.
The grants, designed to allow senior researchers the opportunity to engage in pioneering, curiosity-led projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs, are amongst the most prestigious and sought-after funding schemes in Europe.
Professor Nava Ashraf from STICERD and the Department of Economics will receive her award for her work on Female Flourishing and the Economic Frontier.
Professor Ashraf said:“I’m thrilled to receive the support from the ERC for an agenda that understands women's flourishing in the context of a broader social fabric, and how it can create efficiency gains for all. I am deeply grateful to all my colleagues, particularly among our many government partners in Zambia, who have shaped this research with their cultural values and understanding.
“In a climate where the empowerment of women is seen as individualist, often resulting in backlash, this agenda seeks to shift the academic and policy conversation. It aims to promote women’s flourishing in ways that preserve, instead of straining, the social fabric that connects them to their families, partners, and communities.”
Professor Johannes Spinnewijn from STICERD and the Department of Economics will receive his award for his work on Uncovering Inequality in Health and Healthcare: Data-Driven Insights for Policy Change.
Professor Spinnewijn said:“I’m thrilled to receive an ERC Advanced Grant for the HEALTHINEQ project, which will explore how and why health inequalities emerge across socio-economic groups – and what policies can effectively reduce them.
“HEALTHINEQ will bring together population-scale administrative and health records, starting with the Netherlands and Sweden – two countries with exceptional infrastructure for linking social, economic and medical data. These unique datasets allow us to track health over the life course and examine the mechanisms that generate and sustain inequality: from disease incidence and diagnosis to survival, from access and treatment to the diffusion of medical innovation.
“This is a critical moment for our healthcare systems and for public health policy. We’re living longer – but the goal must be to live healthier for longer, across the entire population. With HEALTHINEQ, we aim to offer policymakers evidence they can act on: timely, rigorous and responsive to the pressures and opportunities facing today’s welfare states.”
Professor Mark Schankerman from STICERD and the Department of Economics will receive his award for his work on Incentives and Dynamics of Innovation.
Professor Schankerman said: “I am honoured to receive the ERC Advanced Grant, and deeply grateful for the research opportunities it will make possible over the next five years.
"My research has three main strands. The first is to develop and apply methodologies to evaluate quantitatively the effectiveness of innovation-supporting public agencies, with particular focus on patent offices in the U.S. and Europe that grant property rights for innovations. The aim is to assess different institutional designs for policy reforms, and thereby provide a new, quantitative approach to comparative institutional analysis. The second strand develops and applies a quantitative methodology for determining the socially optimal standard for patentability, and to benchmark current practice relative to it. The third strand explores how we can use AI-based information about the location of patents in the technology space to study the landscape and dynamics of technology competition and creative destruction at the micro-level where it operates, using patents as the window onto this process.
"A primary focus will be understanding how small and large firms interact in technology competition and the process of creative destruction. Each research strand aims to advance our scientific understanding of these issues and to contribute to the formulation of better evidence-based policies.”
Professor Benjamin Moll from the Department of Economics will receive his award for his work on Pushing the Frontier of Heterogeneous Agent Macro: Expectations Formation and Economic Crises.
Professor Moll said: “One of the key developments in macroeconomics research and focus of my past work has been the incorporation of inequality and distributional considerations into models of the macroeconomy, what I like to sometimes call ‘distributional macroeconomics’’. But these models all make an assumption called ‘rational expectations’ which means that households and firms are assumed to understand the structure and evolution of the complex system they inhabit. This is not only unrealistic but also leads to severe computational difficulties in solving these models, essentially an extreme version of the curse of dimensionality.
“My aim is to overcome these problems by developing alternative approaches to the rational expectations assumption, specifically by adapting ideas from the literature on reinforcement learning in psychology and computer science and by incorporating key empirical evidence on expectations formation.
“The ERC’s support will be absolutely crucial for the ‘distributional macroeconomics’ agenda that aims to develop richer models of the macroeconomy that incorporate inequality and more realistic expectations formation processes."
In total, 281 researchers across Europe have been awarded ERC Advanced Grants, worth in total €721 million.
June 2025