Queen Mary researcher awarded prestigious ERC Starting Grant

5 September 2025

This year, 478 early-career researchers across Europe were selected to receive a share of €761 million in funding. Each awardee will receive up to €1.5 million over five years to lead their own research team and pursue ambitious projects with the potential for major scientific breakthroughs. The competition was intense, attracting nearly 4,000 applications, with only 12% of proposals selected.

Dr Gualdani’s Robust econometrics of games in IO (REGIO) project develops advanced econometric methods to better understand how firms behave when they compete with each other across a wide range of real-world industrial organisation settings. These methods fill important gaps left by existing techniques and offer a structured way to move beyond less credible assumptions about firm behavior and market conditions, allowing researchers to draw more robust conclusions. Their effectiveness is shown through practical applications that support fair competition, strengthen consumer protection, and provide clearer insights into inequality and its distributional impacts.

On receiving the award, Dr Cristina Gualdani, said:

I am honoured to receive this grant and deeply grateful to my colleagues at Queen Mary for their encouragement and support. Through REGIO, I will develop new quantitative methods to study how firms compete and how markets function in practice. This will allow us to challenge unrealistic assumptions, generate more reliable evidence, and shed light on how competition affects consumers, fairness and inequality.”

Alongside this achievement, Dr Gualdani has recently taken on editorial responsibilities in the field. Since January 2025, she has served on the editorial board of The Review of Economic Studies and will also begin a new role as Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics from January 2026.