Juan Ducal and Filippo Tassinari, PhD students at the IEB, are two of the 15 young researchers awarded scholarships this year by the Amics del País Economic Society of Barcelona.
In a ceremony held in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council and chaired by the first deputy mayor, Jaume Collboni and the president of the society, Miquel Roca Junyent, the 15 scholarships, each worth 4,200 euros, were awarded to young researchers and doctoral students linked to universities and research centres in Catalonia.

Filippo Tassinari has a degree and an MSc in Economics from the University of Bologna (Italy) and his thesis is supervised by IEB researchers Miquel Àngel García López and Elisabet Viladecans. The scholarship will enable him to study at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and at the Tinbergen Institute, under Professor Jos van Ommeren. His current research analyses innovative policies in urban mobility for addressing urban problems such as pollution and traffic congestion.

Juan Ducal has a degree in Economics from the University of León and an MRes in Economic Analysis from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). His research interests are the economics of innovation, computational macroeconomics, and technology policies. He will use the scholarship to study at the Department of Economics of the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Prof Diego Restuccia. His research, which aims to identify the misallocation of intangibles, is likely to be of value in the design of industrial policies seeking to promote growth through innovation.