Scientific expertise
Scientific expertise
Prof. Blanco's research studies the factors shaping individual and firm decisions to conserve natural resources. It crosses the fields of environmental, behavioral and experimental economics. She has more than 15 years experience in working on a wide collection of topics regarding cooperation on social dilemmas for conservation decisions. This provides her with a wide expertise into the topic of cooperation for conservation that she now embraces for the design of interventions to foster cooperation for conservation. She has contributed to our understanding of the relevance for cooperation on conservation decisions of (i) scarcity of natural resources, (ii) the fragility of natural resources to overuse, (iii) the relevance of institutions in the lab, (iv) of real-life institutions in the field on the cooperation of day-to-day natural resource users, and (v) the substitution of concern for the Covid-19 pandemic at the expense of concern for climate change and other priorities of the Agenda 2030. Prof. Blanco studies cooperation using varied sort of economic experiments coupled with evidence from field experiments with complementary data from questionnaires, surveys, interviews and secondary data to assess the robustness and external validity of findings. In recent years her research priorities have gravitated towards field experiments, still in combination with other methodologies, in multi-method studies in line with the methodological approach in this project.
Get to know more about her research: www.esther-blanco.com
Prof. Calsamiglia reinforces the expertise in the team on developing in-class training interventions in the education system. She also supports the data collection in Spain. She is co-founder of Pentabilities and she has close to 20 years of experience in studying the education system. Pentabilities foster cooperation through training teachers to integrate formative assessment on socio-emotional skills such as responsibility and cooperation in the classroom. Teachers share with students concrete socio-emotional development objectives and the behaviours that will elicit the achievement of such objectives. Both students and teachers are asked to collect observational data on themselves, and their peers, and evidence is used to gain awareness and identify paths for improvement. The pentabilities interventions train teachers to integrate this simple development cycle into their daily classes. Pentabilities are being tested in field RCTs in 80 high schools as part of the EU Next Generation Funds invested by Spain on the improvement of the educational system. The scientific papers with first results for the field RCTs are currently ongoing. Pentabilities have not been tested before as a tool to train cooperation for climate-friendly decisions, which is a first contribution of this work package. Neither have the impacts of pentabilities been assessed by means of real-life measures outside the classroom, nor economic experiments. In addition, the comparison of the relative performance of pentabilities with respect to boosting, as well as their synergies, are novel to the literature.
Get to know more about her research: Website
Dr. Glätzle-Rützler reinforces the expertise in the team on studying children's social preferences by using economic experiments, with a focus on the origin and evolution of cooperation. She also supports the data collection in Austria. She has been studying the economic decision-making behavior of children and young people since 2007. Her research tackles how children and young people make decisions in simple tasks, such as sustainability decisions, savings decisions, decisions on cooperation in groups or when “sharing a cake”. She investigates these topics by playing out simple tasks with children and young people, where they can also receive a small reward, adapted to the age of the child, as an incentive. In recent years, she has carried out school and kindergarten research projects with more than 6,000 children and young people in Tyrol and South Tyrol.
Get to know more about her research on social preferences in children (in German).
Dr. Sherif reinforces the expertise in the team on measuring real-life pro-environmental behavior by students. She also supports the data collection in India. She has 5 years of experience working on environmental behaviours and policy interventions targeted at encouraging pro-environmental choices, having worked with more than 6,000 children. She uses insights from behavioural economics in her research, combining experimental methods in field, lab-in-the-field, and online survey experiments, in both developed and developing countries.
Get to know more about her research: Website