Four UB School of Economics PhD students awarded SEBAP mobility grants

Four UB School of Economics PhD students have been awarded a research mobility grant by the Barcelona Economic Society of Friends of the Country (SEBAP). The recipients are Tania Fernández-Navia, Jeffrey Pagel, Giorgos Papadomichelakis and Kinga Barbara Tchorzewska. The grant provides €4,200 in funding for a visiting period at a foreign institution. In this case, the four PhD students have chosen the University of Warwick, University of California in San Diego, University of Oxford and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The prize ceremony took place at the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Hall on March 25th, 2019.

From February to June 2019, Tania Fernandez-Navia is visiting the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Prof. Manuel Bagües.  There she is analysing the long-lasting effects of the Great Recession on the Spanish labour market.  Namely, she aims at identifying the presence of hysteresis and its potential driving mechanisms related to the human capital deterioration and the health status of workers. Her research has the potential to contribute to the academic understanding of the enduring effects of temporary shocks, which has important policy implications.

Jeffrey Pagel has been accepted to the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development to research in the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative under the supervision of Dr. Sabina Alkire. The main goals of the visiting research stay are to advance two different projects. The first conceptualises energy poverty through the lens of different human development approaches, develops a new definition of energy poverty, and provides quantitative evidence in support of viewing energy poverty through a multidimensional lens. The second paper operationalises the ideas set forth in the previous paper to empirically test how various energy deprivations affect the wellbeing of individuals in Uganda.

Georgios Papadomichelakis has joined the University of California in San Diego, where he is working under the supervision of Prof. Simone Galperti from March to June 2019. There he is focusing on the second and third papers of his thesis, both in the field of Social Learning. The first will develop a model of social learning, identify conditions under which learning is inefficient and put forward an international design approach that can account for those inefficiencies. The second will put the theory developed in the former paper to the test.

Kinga Barbara Tchorzewska investigates the effects of environmental taxes and investment tax incentives on the adoption of green technologies among manufacturing firms. She has joined University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in February and is expected to stay there until June 2019. She is carrying out her research under the supervision of Prof. Tatyana Deryugina, who is an expert in public finance and environmental economics, with excellent publications in the field of microeconomics. This research stay will allow Kinga to identify the environmental policies and policy-mixes, which aim at creating incentives for the firms to decrease the pollution levels.

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