Durante, Ruben
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
Social & Behavioural Sciences
Short biography
Full Professor in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Affiliated Faculty of the BSE and of the Institute of Political Economy and Governance, Research Fellow at CESifo, and Research Affiliate at CEPR. Prior to joining UPF, I was post-doctoral fellow at Yale University, and assistant and then associate professor of economics at Sciences Po. My work has been published in top reviews in economics, management, and political science including the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, Management Science, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Economic Journal: Applied, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of the European Economic Association. I have received several grants and awards including from the European Research Council (Starting Grant), the Fundación La Caixa, and the BBVA Foundation. I have served as associated editor for the Journal of the European Economic Association and the European Economic Review.
Research interests
My fields of research are political economy, media economics, and economic development. My research focuses primarily on the functioning and impact of traditional and new media in both mature and consolidating democracies. Specifically, I examine various aspects of the multi-faceted relationship between media, voters, policy-makers and special interests, with particular regard to the ability of an independent press to keep both policy-makers and private interests accountable. Some of the questions tackled in my work include: i) the impact of entertainment television on viewers' socio-political preferences, ii) the strategies used by policy-makers to minimize public scrutiny of their actions, iii) the impact of the Internet on political participation, iv) the influence of corporate interests on the policymaking process, v) the determinants of beliefs about fairness and preferences for redistribution, vi) the imapct of nation-building policies on interethnic tensions in Africa.