Five-year ERC grant funds research into social effects on economic activity

Professor Adam Szeidl of CEU’s Economics Department won a five-year "Networks" grant from the European Research Council. With a project budget of more than 1 million EUR, Szeidl plans to conduct empirical reserach on the effect of social networks on economic outcomes and combine experiments and firm level data to investigate questions including how social connections help make microfinance work in developing countries, how diffusion of knowledge about export markets among firm managers affects foreign trade, and how political connections affect firm productivity. One goal of the project, which began Nov. 1, is to learn how to improve economic policies by considering social mechanisms.