📋 Tender Overview
Grant agreement ID: 101267506
DOI
10.3030/101267506
EC signature date
20 August 2026
Start date
1 January 2027
End date
31 December 2031
Funded under
European Research Council (ERC)
Total cost
No data
EU contribution
€ 2 495 967,00
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that criminal activities generate nearly 4% of global GDP, with organized crime, tax evasion, and corruption accounting for most of it. To enjoy these illicit gains, criminals must convert them into deployable assets within the legal economy, creating substantial demand for money laundering—the transformation of criminal proceeds into apparently legitimate funds. A global industry supplies laundering services while eluding enforcement, moving $800 billion–$2 trillion annually. Fighting money laundering is essential yet extraordinarily difficult.
Despite its scale and relevance, money laundering is virtually absent from economics. The main obstacle is the lack of reliable data to test and refine conceptual frameworks. This project will establish the economics of money laundering as a new field in applied economics. Building research partnerships with Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs), I will unearth previously unused data and develop and test new models to place money laundering at the research frontier of several applied economics fields.
I develop a new framework in which Suspicious Transaction Reports—the cornerstone of anti-money laundering intelligence and a rich, confidential, but previously unused data source—reflect an equilibrium between (1) demand for money laundering, driven by criminal activity; (2) the supply of laundering services, driven by intermediaries connecting illicit and legal economies; and (3) enforcement, shaped by the incentives and capabilities of designated reporting entities.
The agenda spans the full research-to-policy arc through three core projects—on demand, supply, and enforcement—anchored in an innovative partnership with the Italian FIU. Two projects on trade-based money laundering (the dominant channel in developing countries) and on the regulation of crypto-assets (the newest technology) extend the agenda to the geographic and technological frontiers of money laundering.
