Four PhD students at the UB School of Economics awarded SEBAP mobility grants

Four PhD students at the UB School of Economics have each been awarded a researcher mobility grant by the Barcelona Economic Society of Friends of the Country (SEBAP). The four recipients of the €4.200 award are Niclas Frederic Poitiers, Marc Puigmulé Solà, Moisés Obaco and Pierre Magontier. The grant scheme provides funding to undertake an academic stay at a foreign institution. UB School of Economics grantees will be visiting students at Northwestern University (USA), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Groningen (Netherlands) and University of Southern California (USA). The prize ceremony took place at the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Hall on March 20th, 2018.

The purpose of Niclas Frederic Poitiers visit at Northwestern University is to work with the expert in demographic economics Prof. Matthias Deopke on the second chapter of his PhD thesis on endogenous fertility. Mr. Poitiers’ doctoral research analyses the effects that education and wage premiums have on fertility, which will allow him to draw conclusions regarding family policy, to create conditions for fertility to recover and improve the school performance of children from poor families.

Marc Puigmulé Solà will be a visiting PhD student at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, source of many high quality scientific publications on government behaviour, corruption and fiscal consolidation. After the research stay Mr. Puigmulé Solà will be able to determine whether government’s composition is a decisive factor for corruption and fiscal consolidation.

The University of Groningen will host our PhD student Moisés Obaco, whose doctoral research focuses on the benefits and costs of cities from an economic perspective of the regional science. The main objective during his months in Groningen is to locate crime clusters to match them with socio-economic in order to shed new light into urban planning to reduce crime rates. In Groningen, Mr. Obaco will work with experienced researchers in the use of specific software that adds the geographic dimension into the statistical analysis.

PhD student Pierre Magontier will develop part of his doctoral Research at the University of Southern California, where he will have the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Jorge de la Roca. There he will explore the political mechanisms underlying the supply of coastal lands for urban development starting from the premise that municipalities surrounded by neighbours controlled by the same party will be less tempted to overdevelop coastal segments.

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