Edoardo Gallo
Title of research:
Contact tracing, quarantine, and financial activity
The emergence of novel COVID-19 variants means that contact tracing and quarantine measures will remain an important part of the pandemic-management toolkit. The aim of this project is to experimentally investigate the impact of these measures on the resumption of economic/financial activity and the spread of the disease. Our design will look at optional and mandatory tracing and quarantine schemes, and compare their relative effectiveness at curbing infection rates and enabling the return to full economic/financial activity.
The project is the first to experimentally study actual behaviour of people under different tracing and quarantining regimes.
Monetary networks
Recently the developed world has experienced an erosion of norms of cooperation. Partly responsible is a decline in the social networks that used to sustain them. Concurrently, market-based mechanisms and financial institutions replaced the function of networks in several domains, leading many to believe a causal connection exists between these trends. This project aims to investigate experimentally the causal role played by social networks on the development of financial institutions used to sustain cooperation. It will bring closer together the micro literature on networks and cooperation, and the macro-finance literature on decentralized models of money and financial intermediation.
An Experimental Study of Financial Contagion in Networks
The 2008 global financial crisis highlighted the crucial role that the network architecture of the financial system plays in determining systemic contagion. The aim of this project is to conduct a series of experiments to investigate how different network structures affect the probability of systemic contagion in experimental asset markets. A particular focus will be on how (i) market participants’ knowledge about the network and (ii) the structure of the trading environment interact with the network structure to cause financial contagion.