My open research windows

What am I doing when I’m not writing in this blog or other personal activities? Well, I teach and do research. Thanks to credit accumulated in the past, now I don’t have to teach until September, so time to try to push my research hard.

I am working on political connections in Spanish firms and their impact with Pau Castells (and starting something on the specific impact on energy firms with Daniel Montolio also). Our starting point is Pau’s thesis and a paper we already published in the journal Series. I’m also working on the economics of Public Private Partnerships with Lluis Torrens and Giampiero Mattera. And a piece on the institutions of soccer with Jordi Perdiguero. Most of this is empirical, although I try to keep it closely related to the theoretical literature.

On my own, I’m working on the relationship between behavioural regulators (that is, regulators with psychological biases that make them depart from full rationality) and institutional architecture, and I’ll present something about this in a conference in Bristol in June and in a Workshop in Barcelona in July. My idea is to survey recent literature on behavioural regulation (these are many of the lots of papers that visitors can see on my office’s desk) and apply it to issues I have explored in the past, such as independent regulators, regulatory federalism or the merger of regulatory agencies.

Ideas and suggestions for collaboration are more than welcome.

I see all this as fascinating on its own and complementary of my teaching work, both in class and as a supervisor of theses or similar work by students (of which I typically do a lot, because I learn from my students with it).