Home>Thomas CHANEY is awarded an ERC "Advanced" grant
09.04.2020
Thomas CHANEY is awarded an ERC "Advanced" grant
On March 31st, 2020 the European Research Council (ERC) announced the winners of the latest “Advanced Grants” competition.
Advanced grants are awarded to established researchers who have a track-record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years and who would like long-term funding to pursue a ground-breaking, high risk project.
The project “Historical Migrations, Trade, and Growth” (HMTG) submitted by permanent faculty member Thomas CHANEY, is one of only 8 projects selected at the European level in the field of economics.
It is the 15th time that one of the Department’s faculty members has been awarded an ERC grant in less than 10 years. And this is the second time that Professor Chaney has been awarded a prestigious ERC grant: in 2013 he was awarded an ERC “Starting grant” for his project “FiNet: Firms Networks, Trade, and Growth » that was prolonged until this year. He was also an NSF grant recipient in 2011 for his project “The Network Structure of International Trade”.
Thomas CHANEY is Professor of Economics at the Department since 2016. He is currently Joint Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He is also a Research Fellow at the CEPR (International Trade and Regional Organizations) and a Research Fellow of the CESifo Research Network. Prior to joining the Department, he was Professor of Economics at Toulouse School of Economics, where he taught since 2012.
His primary research fields are International Trade, Networks, Economic History and Finance. His work has been published in leading international, peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies.
The HMTG Project builds on his FiNet ERC project whose objective was to introduce the notion of large-scale economic networks into the mainstream of economics, in particular in macroeconomics and international trade and a very original line of research he has been developing for the past few years which analyses ancient trade with the tools of modern economics (read the interview “In Search of Lost Cities”).
For this new project, Professor Chaney sets out to explore a number of questions: “Do international migrations foster economic dynamism and growth? Does the presence of immigrants and their descendants alter the attitudes and actions of natives towards foreigners? How do cities emerge and survive? Does economic growth increase wellbeing in the long run?”. The project’s hypothesis is that “direct contact between individuals affects their preferences and the technologies they use”. Professor Chaney proposes to test this hypothesis from different angles, at different points in time, and over different horizons (eight in all). The unifying methodology is to use historical data spanning the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Middle Age, and modern history and to collaborate with a team made up of both economists and historians.
Read more about the HMTG Project
Consult the ERC’s press release
