Pia Pinger receives the prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her project “OPPORTUNITY – Inequalities in Decision-Making at Critical Junctions in Life: The Role of Ability Signals for Sorting and Selection”. The goal of the project is to analyze why the socio-economic background of parents has a strong influence on the educational and labor market decisions of young people, and what role grades, recommendations, and other so-called “ability signals” play in this. The grant will run for 5 years and is endowed with 1.5 million euros. “The ERC Starting Grant allows me to shed new light on the emergence of socio-economic inequalities early in the life cycle to better understand why we observe such low rates of social mobility in many countries,” so Pinger. For more information, click here.

Pia Pinger joined the University of Cologne in 2019 as Professor of Applied Microeconomics and Behavioral Economics. She is also Principal Investigator in the Center for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB), in the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy and in the Collaborative Research Center Economic Perspectives on Societal Challenges.