The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)’s central programme, CORE, seeks to strengthen the scientific quality of public research corresponding to the country’s research priorities. The multi-annual thematic research programme supports researchers at all stages of their careers, from postdoc to leading researchers.
The Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance is proud to announce that five FNR CORE projects coordinated by FDEF researchers have been accepted and will begin in 2022. Of these projects, two are funded by the CORE Junior scheme (piloted by a junior researcher who is supported by a more senior faculty member) and one is a CORE international project.
The overall amount of funding obtained by the researchers amounts to approximately EUR 2.2M.
ORIGINS – Social origins and intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic outcomes
Beginning March 2022
This project, led by Prof. Konstantinos Tatsiramos from the Department of Economics and Management in cooperation with LISER, aims to expand and deepen knowledge on the causes of growing economic inequality and its persistence by studying the influence of social origins on individual socioeconomic trajectories. Unpacking the origins of existing inequalities and the way in which they are passed on from parents to children is key for understanding their consequences for social cohesion in the long run.
ORIGINS focuses on three key stages of the family life cycle along which parents and their choices may influence their offspring: through spouse selection in the parental generation, through offspring conception and upbringing and through offspring entry into the labour market. Deploying high quality administrative data from Denmark that enable linking parents to their children across their entire life on several socioeconomic outcomes such as education, income and wealth, the project develops an innovative econometric framework to apply these data based on a model of intrafamily labour earnings dynamics.
ORIGINS research outcomes can be used to inform policy makers designing public policies to support disadvantaged children and address low social mobility and existing inequalities.
GREEN – Sustainable Finance and the Efficient Allocation of Capital
Beginning April 2022
Prof. Roman Kräussl from the Department of Finance will be coordinating the GREEN project in cooperation with Stanford University and VU University Amsterdam. The project aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of public and private sources of financing in the efficient allocation of capital aimed at sustainability transformation. By addressing the limitations of current ESG metrics, which rely on company-reported, non-standardised data, researchers hope to provide a comprehensive framework for organisations to be able to evaluate ESG-related risks and opportunities in order to realign their strategy. This will be carried out during the GREEN project through five actions:
- Identifying the fundamental sustainability impact of a company using the 17 UN Sustainable development goals
- Evaluating the extent of divergence between self-reported sustainability practices and estimates of fundamental sustainability, analysing the impact this gap may have on misallocation of capital to sustainable projects and companies
- Assessing the sustainability footprint of ESG-labelled ETFs employing the proposed fundamental sustainability metric along all sustainable development goal dimensions.
- Providing a framework for the assessment of the sustainability alignment of infrastructure assets
- Investigating the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and bond prices, returns and underlying risks
MIGDCM – Modeling Migration Intentions using Advanced Discrete Choice Models
Beginning March 2022
Principal investigator, Prof. Michel Beine from the Department of Economics and Management, will work in close collaboration with a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne Switzerland on the MIGDCM project. The aim of this 3-year project is to propose extensions of the use of the Cross-Nested Logit (CNL) approach to the modelling of location choices, allowing researchers to better capture the stochastic structure of these choices.The research program extends the pioneer work of researchers Beine, Bierlaire and Docquier in 2021 and tackles the most pressing issues of the use of the CNL.
Firstly, the project will evaluate the transferability of the CNL to other contexts than the previously-studied case of India. Secondly, it will develop the technique of alternative sampling to include a comprehensive set of destinations within the CNL. And finally, it will improve the specifications, in particular by modelling perceptions of individuals through latent variables and it will evaluate the relevance of using preparation plans for migration rather than pure intentions in capturing self-selection factors of mobility.
DIGISKILLS – Digitalization, Change in Skills and Firms’ Hiring Difficulties
Beginning September 2022
Dr. Morgan Raux, postdoctoral researcher within the Department of Economics and Management, will be supported by Prof. Arnaud Dupuy for the CORE Junior project DIGISKILLS. For this project, researchers will take advantage of new digital tools to study the labor market effects of digitalization. By using large job posting databases collected online, researchers will be able to assess the effects of hiring difficulties on workers and firms that have mostly been overlooked in the academic literature.
First, researchers will investigate the effect of digitalization on recruitment challenges in France and its impact on wages. Second, they will study the effects of recruitment challenges on firms’ productivity and innovation in Luxembourg. They will also document firms’ mitigation strategies to respond to recruitment challenges and explore how the productivity impacts vary across firms adopting different strategies based on outsourcing, upskilling and on the recruitment of foreign-born workers. Finally, the research team will focus on the relationship between labor market tightness and the recruitment of international students in the United States.
FOMESA – Forgotten Memories of Supranational Adjudication
Beginning September 2022
This FNR CORE Junior project is coordinated by Dr. Michel Erpelding, postdoctoral researcher in Law, supported by Prof. Luc Heuschling. FoMeSA challenges the institutional narrative that the practice of letting international courts decide on claims by private persons against sovereign states was an innovation of post-WWII Europe.
Today, we know that the powerful (and sometimes controversial) international courts and tribunals created in post-WWII Europe were hardly an entirely new phenomenon. Such courts already existed both in the colonial context and in Europe during the interwar period. The architects of the post-WWII European courts and tribunals were aware of these precedents and used them as a source of inspiration.
The FoMeSA project thus aims to assess the continuities and discontinuities between these historical international courts and the international courts we know today, especially in Europe. By offering new historical comparisons and inviting the public to re-integrate them into their memories, it will also contribute to present-day debates on the role and legitimacy of international courts and tribunals.