The VERA Centre aims at improving resilience in economics and society, preventing, predicting, measuring, and managing risks thanks to the use of big data sources. Big data has changed the way that we understand existing social challenges, and it has created entirely new research questions, which call for advances in science. The goal of the VERA Centre is to investigate these questions focusing on three main thematic macro-areas of interest in public policy making: welfare and wellbeing, environment, macroeconomics and finance.
Main research activities
Analysis of social risks related to welfare system and wellbeing
The challenge is to understand how to ensure economic growth and social wellbeing for a socio-economic system with complex structure and dynamics. The complexity of the relationships between markets, institutions and public authorities makes the decision process even more difficult. A first response to this challenge is the opportunity to analyse and integrate big data from different sources (individual micro-data, experimental data, big data from administrative records, georeferenced data, etc.) to support the decision making process.
Key topics:
- Active ageing and demographic change
- Agent-based models
- Behavioural economics
- Decision sciences
- Education policy
- Gender equality
- Health economics
- Inequalities
- Integration
- Long term care
- Migration
- Regional studies
- Smart agrifood and sustainability
- Smart cities and energy efficency
- Welfare
Analysis of environmental and climate risks and related impacts
Economic analysis at territorial level for disaster risk assessment and management, including the analysis of the different physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes such as climate change, overconsumption of natural resources, poverty and inequality. Big data from sensor networks and from social media provide the opportunity to improve disaster risk prediction and management.
Key topics:
- Climate econometrics
- Data and model comparisons
- Downscaling of global changes to regional/local environments for integrated assessment of socio-ecosystems
- Identification of abrupt climate shifts
- Integrate climate. Socio-economic and enviromental modelling
- Natural and anthropogenic climate changes
- Near-term climate prediction and predictability
- Observation and monitoring of present and global climate variability
- Risk, vulnerability and adaptation assessment for climate change
Analysis of financial and macro-economic risks
Analysis and evaluation of financial and macroeconomic risks, also in cooperation with financial authorities. The activity and regulation of financial markets produce a large amount of data that can be an essential source of information for a deep understanding of the agent behaviour and the markets dynamics. Big data can be used in the supervisory activity to measure and manage financial risks, market instabilities and sustainability.
Key topics:
- Behavioural analysis
- Big data in health economics
- Blockchain and crypto-currencies
- Climate risk and insuranceCyber-risk
- Data analytics and tourism
- Data analytics for wealth managment
- Digital banking and high frequency trading
- Econometric methods and machine learning
- Energy efficiency finance
- ESG risk assessment
- Financial and macroeconomic risks
- Finetech and insur-tech
- Modelling structured high dimensional data
- Networks data analysis and modelling
VERA Research Prize
for publication of papers in high quality journals
In May 2020, the VERA Management Board set up a Research Prize to increase the publication of papers in high quality journals by Economics Department scholars.
The Research Prize established a ranking list of journals in the fields of Economics, Econometrics and Statistics, Finance, Operations Research and Management Science, Regional Studies, Planning and Environment, Social Sciences.
The list is mainly based on the Tilburg University Ranking database and on the Academic Journal Guide of 2018 and takes into consideration the journals classified ANVUR - class A.
Development
for research activity
From a methodological point of view, the research activity of the Centre requires the development of:
- new methods and econometrics models for the analysis of large databases, high frequency data and georeferenced data, taking into particular consideration the interaction with other disciplines such as statistics, mathematics and machine learning;
- agent based model and multi-agent model for simulating interactions among heterogeneous actors to evaluate effects and impacts on the policy decisions system;
- lab and field experiments is a prerequisite for the link between different techniques of data collection, data analysis and data modelling in economic and social fields.
Researchers at the Department of Economics already have experience and produce scientific results in these fields making it possible to develop frontier research, and applied research over the five years of the project (and beyond).
Events
A cycle of study seminars, workshops and conferences on several current economics topics have been organized in the framework of the VERA research Center, also in cooperation with other on-going national and European funded projects managed by the Department.
These events carried out by eminent international academics are a great opportunity to discuss relevant economic issues and topics with students, researchers and members of academic staff.
Past events
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) - World Meeting, July, 1st-7th 2024
San Giobbe Economics Campus, Ca' Foscari University of Venice - European Conference on Stochastic Optimization - Computational Management Science Conference (ECSO-CMS), June, 29th-30th; July, 1st 2022
San Giobbe Economics Campus, Ca' Foscari University of Venice - Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance (eMAF), September 18th, 22nd and 25th 2020
International remote conference - Workshop annuale Società Italiana di Economia e Politica Industriale (SIEPI), January, 30th-31st 2020
San Giobbe Economics Campus, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
2022
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Spatial Health Econometrics Summer School, 7th-9th July 2022 | 861 KB |
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VERA Experimental Behavioral Economics Workshop, 23rd-24th June 2022 | 720 KB |
2021
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3rd One-Day International Workshop on Machine Learning for Finance, 17th December 2021 | 704 KB |
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Anglo-French-Italian Macro Workshop, 10th-11th December 2021 | 1 MB |