Decision-Making under Acute Geopolitical Uncertainty: Evidence from the Greenland Crisis
Decision-Making under Acute Geopolitical Uncertainty: Evidence from the Greenland Crisis
Name of applicant
Paolo Falco
Title
Associate Professor
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 1,323,073
Year
2026
Type of grant
Urgent Research Project
What?
Recent geopolitical tensions around Greenland have created sudden diplomatic, security, and economic uncertainty for Denmark. This project exploits this rare, time-sensitive context to study how acute, unresolved geopolitical shocks affect citizens’ beliefs, risk preferences, prosocial behavior, and policy views, generating unique evidence on how geopolitical tensions affect society.
Why?
Geopolitical shocks can reshape public attitudes toward security, cooperation, and redistribution, yet we know little about their immediate effects. Understanding how citizens react to sudden uncertainty is crucial for democratic resilience, informed policymaking, and managing public responses during international crises.
How?
We conduct a time-sensitive survey experiment on a representative sample of the Danish population to document beliefs and preferences in the face of unprecedented geopolitical risk and uncertainty. By randomly varying information and the salience of the Greenland situation, we can measure the effects of the crisis on beliefs, risk preferences, prosocial behavior, and policy attitudes.