Enhancing the Regularity, Granularity and Impact Assessment of Conflict Forecasts for Policy Makers

IP: Hannes Mueller

FCDO-UK Government

2024-2025

This project, funded by the UK’s FCDO through the GSRA programme, enhances global conflict forecasting by publishing monthly subnational predictions of violence, riots, and sexual violence at the ADM2 level for 3- and 12-month horizons via conflictforecast.org. Using machine learning, geo-located news, and economic analysis, the forecasts aim to support early warning systems. The project also assesses the economic impact of conflict on UK trade, revealing that rising conflict risks significantly reduce imports—especially minerals, textiles, and chemicals—as shown in case studies on Libya and Ukraine. Vulnerabilities in UK supply chains, particularly for critical minerals from high-risk countries like South Africa and Türkiye, are highlighted. Forecast maps identify global hotspots for violence and riots, helping policymakers and humanitarian actors take preventive action.

Global predictions of any violence

Global predictions of any riot

Early-warning systems for fragility: institutional disruption and internally dis-placed people

IP: Hannes Mueller

FFO- S05-P-01-German Government

2025

This project, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, aims to enhance humanitarian policymaking through the development of two early-warning systems. The first system expands upon an existing prototype designed to detect institutional disruptions in news media. It broadens the scope of detectable events to include electoral violence and restrictions on press freedom, in addition to coups, term limit evasions, and judicial weakening. The second system focuses on internal displacement, exploring the potential of predictive models to inform the allocation of emergency response funding.

Key outputs of the project will include academic publications, conference presentations, and collaborative workshops to foster knowledge exchange within the early-warning community. Furthermore, the project will release publicly accessible code and datasets—subject to ethical and privacy considerations—and maintain a dedicated webpage for publishing data on institutional disruptions

Institutional disruption pipeline architecture

Closing the Maternity Pension Gap? Impact of Maternal Pension Supplements

PI: Cristina Bellés

FUNDACIÓN RAMON ARECES

2025-2027

The objective of this project is to analyze the effectiveness of pension supplements in reducing the gender gap, focusing on mothers. Women face a higher risk of poverty in old age due to lower pensions, which result from career interruptions caused by motherhood. In the European Union, the gender pension gap is 29%, while in Spain it reaches 31.3%. In 2016, Spain introduced a pension supplement for mothers with two or more children (5% for two children, 10% for three, and 15% for four or more) to compensate for the impact of childrearing on their careers. This project will evaluate its impact using a difference-in-differences approach, comparing women with two or more children to those with fewer children (or to men), before and after 2016. It will also analyze whether the 2021 reform, which extended the supplement to fathers, has altered the previous effects. This study aims to contribute to the design of public policies that reduce the gender gap in pension systems.

Methodologies for the economic impacts of climate change in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

IP: Jaume Freire

CETAQUA

2023-2025

In the context of the Horizon European project ICARIA (Improving ClimAte Resilience of crItical Assets), Jaume Freire collaborates with CETAQUA on the development of methodologies for damages caused by different climate change risks, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, forest fires and other extreme weather events.  As part of the project, macroeconomic impact models have been developed to assess droughts in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), and work is underway on developing a methodology for analyzing direct and indirect tangible damages caused by other climate risks (floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and wind), and adapting it to the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona.

Aggregation and acquisition of information in markets: positive and normative aspects

PI: Jordi Brandts and Xavier Vives

IESE

2021-2027

IESE and the Fundació d’Economia Analítica signed a collaboration agreement to conduct research on the positive and normative aspects of information aggregation and acquisition in markets. The project aims to analyze the incentives for economic agents to acquire information when they later have to compete and operate in the market, study strategies for acquiring and negotiating information, and assess the welfare impact on all market participants, with the goal of informing policy recommendations.

In 2024, a series of laboratory experiments were conducted at LINEEX (University of Valencia), focusing on a financial market where an asset with uncertain value is traded.  The findings were presented under the title “Information Bias, Communication, and Financial Markets: An Experimental Study” at the International Meeting in Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (IMEBESS) in May 2025 in Valencia.

Currently, a new laboratory experiment is underway to study how biased information, combined with the presence of social networks, can affect the functioning of financial markets.