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Faculty of Economics

Dr Debopam Bhattacharya awarded European Research Council Grant

Dr Debopam Bhattacharya

The Faculty is very pleased to announce that Dr Debopam Bhattacharya was awarded a 5-year ERC "Consolidator" grant for his project titled "Empirical Demand and Welfare Analysis (EDWEL)". The consolidator grants, worth up to €2 million each, are awarded annually to excellent mid-career scientists to enable them to consolidate their research teams and to develop their innovative ideas.

ERC Press Release

The synopsis of Dr Bhattacharya project:

Measurement of consumer welfare is central to economic evaluations. It underlies calculation of price-indices, formulation of tax policies, and environmental and industrial regulation. But existing measurement methods rely on restrictive assumptions about consumer preferences, leading to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding policy-impacts. The proposed project aims to make fundamental contributions to empirical welfare analysis by developing nonparametric approaches, which would avoid such assumptions and thus produce reliable welfare estimates from micro-data. The emphasis will be on welfare-evaluation of price/quality changes in the under researched but common real-life setting of discrete-choice, e.g., the impact of tuition subsidies for college entrants, fare-hikes for passengers and access to new channels for TV viewers. The project will cover (i) discrete choice with multinomial/ordered/non-exclusive alternatives, (ii) random coefficient choice-models, (iii) settings where one’s choice affects one’s peers’ utilities, and (iv) dynamic choice under uncertainty such as durable-purchase or retirement decisions.