About Ernesto

Ernesto María Gavassa-Pérez

Ernesto earned his BSc in Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, and has also earned two MSc’s; one at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and another one at the University of Nottingham. He recently earned his PhD in Behavioral Economics at the University of Nottingham, being supervised by Robin Cubitt and Simon Gächter. He passed his viva with no corrections, being Chris Starmer and Bertil Tungodden his internal and external examiners respectively. Ernesto has been hosted by Bertil Tungodden as a visiting PhD Student at the Norwegian School of Economics, and will stay there until mid June, 2022.

During his PhD studies, he served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Graduate Teaching Fellow for four years at the University of Nottingham, earning two annual Graduate Teaching Excellence awards. He taught Econometrics, Industrial Organisation, Macroeconomic Theory, Mathematical Economics, and Microeconomic Theory.

His research interests are focused primarily on social behaviour, broadly defined as behaviours taken as an individual that influence other people’s payoffs. His aim is to incorporate more realism into assumptions underlying theories of decision-making applied to social behaviour. In that vein, and inspired by the work of David Hume and Adam Smith,  in his Job Market Paper Ernesto developed two new theories of moral decision-making.

In the near future Ernesto expects to start a research programme in which he can continue to test his new theories against canonical models of other-regarding preferences i) in several games; and ii) in a cross-cultural perspective.

Ernesto will go to the American (ASSA Annual Meeting) and the European (EJME) Job Markets this fall. For enquiries, please send an email to lexegp.17@gmail.com.