Interests
My main research interests are in Political Economy and Experimental Economics, which has led me to explore also topics related to Political Science, Psychology and Biology. A more detailed list of past and current research projects can be found here.
I am also committed to disseminating economic knowledge beyond academia. I have written about the representation of Economics in cinema and I am one of the editors of Nada es Gratis, the most important blog on Economics in Spanish.
Recently, I have brought my lifelong passion for science fiction into my academic pursuits by offering lectures on the interplay between economics and science fiction. You can find some of them in my YouTube channel.
Economics of Conflict
Economic tradition has mainly considered that markets and voting are the only allocation mechanisms.
Casual observation shows that many times individuals and groups not only produce, trade or vote but also influence, appropriate or attack others in order to attain their goals: Self interested agents do choose to what extent they engage in economic and non-economic (conflict) activities.
These ideas ar not new. Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, von Clausewitz, Tolstoi or Marx tried to understand the conflictive aspect of human interactions and pointed out that any peaceful agreement must take it into account.
All this creates an important implication for Economics: In order to be stable, any agreement or allocation generated through markets or voting procedures must give to each agent at least what she could get in case of conflict. Therefore, it is evident that Economics, understood as the study of the allocation of scarce resources, must be concerned about these issues. In fact, in the last years, there has been a growing interest about them. The tools of economic analysis, like Game Theory, have been applied to the exploration of the consequences of incorporating conflict into mainstream Economics.
<-- Back
