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 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 is currently an Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) at University of Navarra.

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. He is currently developing new models of social preferences, testing the theoretical framework he developed in his Job Market Paper further, testing implications of social preference models in a wide variety of economic decisions (e.g., externalities and property rights, international trade), and writing up short papers on issues related to philosophy of science and economic methodology.