EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS

Understanding the Consequences of Health Crises for Education: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic (LEARN)

ERC Starting Grant 2025 - 2030 - Main Investigator: Bastian Betthäuser

Health crises, natural disasters, and violent conflicts increasingly threaten children’s educational development. Such disruptive events are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change and the growing instability of the global security architecture. But we lack a systematic understanding of how major disruptive events affect children’s educational development, largely because such events tend to also disrupt the collection of high-quality data on children’s education. Because of the global scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and extensive data collection efforts as it unfolded, the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the consequences of major health crises for children’s educational development.
The LEARN project will leverage this opportunity to provide a systematic account of how the pandemic has affected the educational development of children in different world regions. To this end, LEARN will generate and apply high-quality, cross-national data and advanced quantitative and meta-analytical techniques. This research programme aims to substantially improve our understanding of how large health crises affect children’s educational development and provide a basis for policy makers to future-proof education systems to meet the growing threats posed by major disruptive events.

A Social Demography of Widowhood across Ageing Societies (WIDOW)

ERC Starting Grant 2024 - 2029 - Main Investigator: Zachary Van Winkle

This ground-breaking research will establish a social demography of widowhood. The foundation of this social demography is an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to estimate the risk of widowhood as well as the mental health and economic vulnerabilities of spousal loss. This research will concentrate on marital spousal loss among adults age 50 and older.

The risk of widowhood subsumes the probability of spousal loss and the duration of remaining widowed. The concept of vulnerability broadly denotes the consequences of widowhood during the pre- and post-widowhood periods for those who expect or not the loss of their spouse. Two types of outcomes are taking into account: mental health, including anxiety, insomnia, depression, and loneliness, as well as economic wellbeing, including household income, poverty, and wealth.
Three pillars support that social demography. The first assesses social inequalities in the risk and vulnerability to widowhood by focusing on how the probability and consequences of spousal loss vary by socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity, nativity, and networks of social support, as well as gender and age.
The second pillar zooms on cross-national differences in the risk and vulnerability to widowhood and their social inequalities. The geographic scope of this project spans middle- and high-income countries with ageing populations varying in demographic trends and welfare systems. The research will analyze all data sources from up to 60 countries.
The third pillar expands the comparative aspect of the project to examine both past and future change over time in the size and composition of the widowed population. Population changes will be assessed over time since 1989, with a projection to 2050.
To be find out more

LIEPP ongoing projects

• Government Policy and Parenting (GP&P) - Led by Laudine Carbuccia (2024-2026).
• Neighborhoods and child development: the French experience - Led by Lidia Panico. Research team: Emilie Grisez and Lawrence Berger (2024-2026).
• Urban and School Sefregation of Children-  Led by Marco Oberti (2024-2026). 
• Riots and public policy: comparative and socio-territorial analysis of the 2023 riots - Led by Marco Oberti (2024-2026).
• PRESPOL - Promoting the economic autonomy of people with disabilities through employment and social policies, led by Anne Revillard (2024-2028). Project funded by the PPR Autonomie.
• POLWOM - Welfare State Change as a Polanyian Double Movement. How social policy change affects women from different social classes, led by Emanuele Ferragina (2023-2024).
• Learning Progress and Inequality During Summer Break - Systematic review and meta-analysis of data on learning progress and inequality during summer break, led by Bastian Betthaeuser and Anders Bach-Mortensen (2022-2023).
• WWY - We're watching you! The effects of targeted messages to companies on hiring discrimination. Led by Mirna Safi and Morgane Laouenan (2022-2024).
• PIECE - Parenting and In Parenting and Inequalities in Early Child development: Experimental evidence - Led by Carlo Barone, Laudine Carbuccia, and Alex de Carvalho (2023-2025).
• Premiers Pas (PPP) - Fostering Access to Childcare in France, directed by Laudine Carbuccia and Carlo Barone (2022-2024).
• PARCOURSANTE - Study of the paths taken by candidates for health studies in the context of the 2020 reform of their access routes, directed by Agnès van Zanten (2022-2024).
• IDEE - Innovations, Data, and Experiments in Education, directed by Carlo Barone and Grégoire Borst. ANR funding (2021-2029).
• Analysis of the impact of the reform of admissions to Sciences Po and integration into the Parcoursup platform. Project led by Marco Oberti (2021-2024). Funding from Sciences Po's Training Department.
• Literature review on policies to support the development of young children's abilities, with Carlo Barone, Angela Greulich and four researchers. As part of the project Evaluating Complex Interventions: The Case of Social Life Animation Policy, led by Anne Revillard, with support from the CNAF (2022-2024).