Fighting Tomorrow’s Droughts Today? Anticipated Agricultural Decline, Climate Stress, and Conflict

Ref: ReCIPE_LOA_0313

IP: Laura Mayoral

The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR),UK

2025-2026

Climate change threatens two pillars of the 2030 Agenda—ending hunger and building peaceful, inclusive societies. While extensive evidence shows that short-lived shocks like droughts, floods, and heatwaves heighten risks of riots, communal clashes, and civil war, a slower channel remains underexplored: conflict that arises because communities anticipate, or already endure, the gradual decline in agricultural productivity from long-run warming and shifting rainfall. Our project targets this pathway by focusing on long-run changes in agricultural productivity. We will quantify whether and where slow-onset agricultural decline elevates the risk of social unrest and organized violence after separating it from short-run weather shocks, identify mechanisms and contexts that amplify or mute this link and translate the findings into practical early-warning and planning tools to target adaptation and peacebuilding where they matter most.

The project will deliver an open-access, harmonised global cell-year panel linking climate-driven yield pressure to conflict since 1990; high-resolution “adaptation-pressure” maps under multiple climate scenarios for 2020, 2050, and 2070; and an empirical analysis that will examine  the links between civil unrest and adaptation pressured under different climate scenarios and  time horizons.

Harmonising and Enhancing Conflict Event Data

Ref: ReCIPE_LOA_0315

IP: Hannes Mueller

The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR),UK

2025-2026

This project develops tools to improve the timeliness, coverage, and comparability of global conflict event data. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) are the two leading efforts that rely on trained human coders to verify, classify, and geolocate violent events from media and secondary sources, providing highly reliable datasets that form the backbone of most academic and policy research on conflict. In contrast, the Global Database of
Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is an automated system that processes news streams in real time and updates every five minutes, offering unmatched speed but with less precision and limited uptake in scholarly work.

This project addresses these challenges by: first, mapping the landscape of available datasets; second, extending ACLED-style event typologies across countries and back to 2010; third, developing probabilistic tools to improve the geo-referencing of coarsely located events; and fourth, operationalizing a now-casting pipeline that fuses weekly updates from ACLED and near–real-time GDELT feeds to anticipate forthcoming UCDP releases, thereby narrowing the information lag that constrains real-world decision-making.

Development and communication of forecasts to anticipate food insecurity. World Food Program sprint accelerator

World Food Program

IP: Hannes Mueller

October 2025- March 2026

EconAI will develop a suite of tools for case load (additional people in food insecurity) forecasts based on our country-level and sub-national conflict and displacement forecasts. The forecast will be developed jointly with the WFP Headquarter Teams to maximize integration and usefulness for decision-making. The goal of the Sprint is to develop 2-4 case studies to understand how national and sub-national forecasts can support WFP country offices to gauge future case loads. This tool will subsequently support the Food Insecurity & Nutrition Analysis Service.

Using conflict and displacement forecasts to anticipate food insecurity

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

IP: Christopher Rauh

November 2025- May 2026

This project explores how new technologies are transforming the world of work. By analyzing millions of job postings and training programs, it identifies which skills are growing in demand, which professions are changing the fastest, and where new opportunities are emerging. The goal is to give governments, companies, and educational institutions a clear, up-to-date picture of how labour markets are evolving. The project also helps match training to real employer needs, ensuring that workers can access the skills that lead to better jobs. By creating easy-to-use tools and practical insights, it supports evidence-based decisions on reskilling, workforce planning, and regional development. Ultimately, the project empowers people, businesses, and policymakers to navigate technological change with confidence.

Bank Competition, Financial Stability, and Monetary Policy Transmission

Bank of Thailand

IP: Hugo Rodríguez

2026

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a framework suitable to inform policy regarding possible trade-offs associated with how bank competition simultaneously affects the transmission of monetary policy and financial stability. In particular, two objectives of the project are as follows:

1. To empirically evaluate how bank competition affects Thailand’s monetary transmission, in particular, its effects on market rates, credit provision in the aggregate and in specific sectors of the Thai economy, such as SMEs.
2. To develop a DSGE model of a small open economy calibrated to Thailand's data which includes two fact-based elements, namely, (i) the dynamics of deposit creation and destruction, and (ii) liquidity, credit, and solvency risks being endogenously determined by credit provision.

Multi-Sector Growth Model Project

University of Notre Dame and CEPR

IP: Martí Mestieri

Period 2026

This contract is funded through the Building Inclusive Growth (BIG) Lab at the University of Notre Dame, within the framework of the Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG) program at CEPR. The objective of the project is to develop and harmonize economic models to analyze structural transformation, resource misallocation across sectors, and future economic scenarios. The project integrates value-added and gross-output frameworks, ensuring conceptual consistency and appropriate nesting between them. Activities include aligning model assumptions, coordinating technical implementation and coding tasks, and constructing model-generated data consistent with observed statistics. Particular attention is given to deflators and real-to-nominal conversions to ensure empirical accuracy. The models will produce key indicators, sectoral ratios, and trade-related metrics for validation against real-world data. Overall, the project aims to deliver coherent, reliable, and empirically grounded analytical tools to support economic research and policy analysis.

Africa Facility to Support United Nations Development Programme

United Nations Development Program (UNDP)

IP: Hannes Mueller

2026

The EconAI  group will partner with Democratie Monitor to support the second phase of the Africa Transition Insights (formerly "Index"), which is a UNDP project - funded by the EU and in collaboration with the African Union. The ATI aims to strengthen and operationalize a data-driven system for identifying and acting on political transition opportunities across Africa. The project will first consolidate and upgrade the existing ATI tabular data while also curating relevant text data and providing a comprehensive data codebook to ensure transparency and usability. In parallel, the team will design, build, test, and deploy "ChatATI", an LLM-based interface. Here users can interact with the curated data to answer factual queries and generate graphics and paragraphs for reporting. Throughout the process, EconAI and Democratie Monitor will coordinate stakeholder engagement, including consultations with Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and AU representatives. Overall, the initiative seeks to translate high-quality transition data into actionable, user-oriented tools that support timely and informed decision-making.

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

IP: Hannes Mueller

FFO- S05-P-01-German Government

2025-2026

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.

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.