The European Research Council has awarded a grant to Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of Cambridge-INET for research titled ‘Micro Structure and Macro Outcomes’.

The ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to 12 years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise.

Research under the project MACRONETS takes as a starting point the organisation of production around supply chain networks and, within these networks, the increasing dominance of very large and central firms. This renders a small number of firms and technologies systemic in that they can influence aggregate economic performance.

“I'm ecstatic,” says Professor Carvalho. “This recognises the combined effort of colleagues around the world in developing a new micro-to-macro research agenda and understanding macroeconomic developments via a new lens.”

He says it also provides the opportunity to inject otherwise scarce resources into early career researchers and PhD students, thereby adding to the human capital in this research area.

“This highlights a decade of collective efforts at the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge and helps ensure its continued growth as a hub for the development of new approaches to decades old questions in Economics,” he says.

MACRONETS explores issues surrounding market power and pro-competitive policies along with innovation, productivity and the diffusion of new technologies. The project also partners with one global financial institution to unlock relevant real-time, highly granular data that is necessary to study some of these questions.