Two LSE academics awarded European Research Council Advanced Grants
Professors Francesco Caselli from the Department of Economics and Rocco Macchiavello from the Department of Management have been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants. They are among 319 outstanding research leaders this year to have been awarded what is some of the EU’s most competitive funding by the ERC.
The Advanced Grants, worth a total of €838 million and part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, give senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
Professor Francesco Caselli, Norman Sosnow Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, will receive his award for his work on Worker Cooperatives, Executive Pay Caps and Inequality.
Professor Caselli commented: "I'm very pleased to receive an ERC Advanced Grant for my project on how firm-level remedies can stem the explosion of inequality without sacrificing economic dynamism and market efficiency.
"Limits on pay inequality within firms and worker cooperatives are often proposed, but we lack the macroeconomic tools to assess them at scale: how they affect employment, productivity, investment and the distribution of income across the whole economy, rather than firm by firm. This grant will make it possible to build economy-wide models capable of answering those questions, and use them to evaluate cooperative ownership and caps on pay dispersion as serious, quantifiable policy options.
"The ERC's support is what makes a project of this ambition and time horizon possible. It lets us take a set of ideas with a very long intellectual history and subject them to the kind of rigorous, quantitative analysis that can inform real economic policy."
Professor Rocco Macchiavello of the Department of Management will receive his award for his work on The Economics of Money Laundering.
Professor Macchiavello commented: "I’m honoured and thrilled to receive an ERC Advanced Grant for this project. While my previous research focused on global value chains and economic development, this agenda takes me into new territory. I am deeply grateful to the colleagues, students, and institutional partners who have helped me build the relationships and foundations needed to make this research possible, and to the ERC for supporting this ambitious endeavour.
"Despite its scale and importance, money laundering remains one of the least understood areas of economic activity. A key reason is the lack of reliable data, which has limited our ability to understand how laundering markets function and how enforcement can be improved.
"This project will build new partnerships with Financial Intelligence Units and anti-money-laundering authorities to access previously unavailable data and shed light on how illicit funds move through the economy, how laundering networks operate, and how reporting and enforcement systems can be made more effective.
"This work comes at a particularly important moment, with the creation of AMLA — the new EU Authority for Anti-Money Laundering — and governments across Europe and beyond strengthening their anti-money-laundering frameworks. Our ambition is to provide the deeper scientific understanding and evidence needed to make those efforts more effective."