INSPIRE announces the winners of the first Student Grant call

INSPIRE is pleased to announce the winners of the first INSPIRE Student Grant call, open to PhD students affiliated with the Centre.

The call received an overwhelming number of applications, reflecting the strength, breadth, and quality of research being developed by INSPIRE-affiliated doctoral students. After a careful review process, the selection panel awarded the grants to Gabriele Archibugi and Erick Baumgartner, both PhD students in Economics at Bocconi University.

Gabriele Archibugi received the grant for a project studying whether low-cost school-based interventions can reduce ethnic segregation in Italian middle-school classrooms by reshaping students’ friendship networks. The pilot will test a light-touch intervention based on classroom seating arrangements, designed to increase repeated interethnic contact during ordinary school activities. By collecting data on friendship networks, aspirations, family background, and behavioural measures of trust, cooperation, and coordination, the project will assess feasibility and generate preliminary evidence on whether changing everyday classroom interactions can improve inclusion and reduce peer segregation.

Erick Baumgartner received the grant for a project examining the productivity effects and downstream spillovers of Generative AI adoption in civil adjudication. The study focuses on airline litigation cases in small-claims civil courts in the São Paulo state court system between 2022 and 2025. By combining large-scale court data, full-text legal documents, and AI-generation detection tools, the project aims to measure the use of large language models by lawyers and judges and assess how this affects case outcomes, judicial productivity, and interactions across different actors in the legal system.

Michela Carlana, Director of INSPIRE, commented:

“The response to the first INSPIRE Student Grant call exceeded our expectations, both in terms of the number of applications received and the quality of the proposals. The selected projects impressed the selection panel for their methodological ambition, originality, and strong potential to generate policy-relevant evidence. Through the Student Grant, INSPIRE aims to support promising early-stage research that combines rigorous empirical methods with strong policy relevance. This initiative also reflects the Centre’s commitment to investing in our students, the economists of tomorrow, and to supporting their ability to develop innovative and rigorous research.”