Social Science

Words are often associated with more than a single meaning. Surprisingly, despite the widespread prevalence of ambiguity in language, word learning is typically studied within developmental psychology as a problem in which only a single meaning needs to be learned for each new word. This simplification has led to a set of theories that can explain how children learn a single, concrete meaning for a word, like “dog”, but fail to illustrate how children develop their vocabulary more generally. The proposed research brings together two investigators with complementary expertise to...

This project explores how countries have held official foreign exchange reserves since the late 19th century and the implications for the current international monetary system. We construct an original dataset that provides for the first time in the long run the distinction between reserves held as foreign deposits and reserves held as purchased foreign securities. We then investigate the political and economic determinants of these two types of foreign reserve holdings, including testing the hypothesis that foreign deposits are less associated with financial openness and a...

This project will investigate counter narratives of colonialism in heritages tours in four major cities across Western Europe: Bordeaux, Barcelona, Edinburgh and Lisbon. Focusing on walking tours of geographic spaces associated with slavery, we examine how black and multi-racial populations challenge the dominant representation of Europe as having no legacies of slavery or racism.

UC...

This project will assess whether election campaigns are good for democracy. We will do so by testing whether voters learn the candidates' policy positions in the 2022 French presidential election. We will then ascertain whether voters who learn the candidates' positions shift their votes to candidates who share their preferences. We will also determine whether they adopt their preferred candidates' positions as their own.

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