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Department of Economics

Newsletter Vol. 22 | January-February 2023

  • The DSE has been selected among the Departments of Excellence, obtaining funding of more than 8 million euros for the next five years. The selection process has been highly competitive, the result of which led to this prestigious success, with the construction of a research project that scored 29/30.
  • Alessandro Tavoni has been awarded the European Research Council (ERC)-funded Consolidator Grant worth €1.8 million on the Green Tipping project. This is a project that aims to explore the effectiveness on a range of representative samples in different countries of actions (Social Tipping Interventions) aimed at promoting large-scale virtuous changes in individual and social behavior in a sustainable way.

EVENTS

January 26-27, 2023: the workshop on Health Economics of Risky Health Behavior (HERB) was held at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna in Piazza Scaravilli. This was the first Italian workshop on the health economics of risky health behavior and brought together a number of professors and scholars to discuss their recent contributions on this topic. Davide Dragone, Pietro Biroli, and Paolo Nicola Barbieri participated as local organizers.  

Visiting Fellows

New Colleagues

Stefania Bortolotti, Associate Professor, SECS-P/01- Economics

Stefania is a behavioral and experimental economists studying fairness, cooperation, and trust. She is also interested in human capital formation and education. She obtained a PhD form the University of Trento, and she was a research fellow at the University of Bologna, the University of Cologne, and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. Her work has been published in international journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, and Journal of Money Credit & Banking. 

Stefano Antonio Bolatto, Senior Assistant Professor (RTD-B), SECS-P/02 Economic Policy

Stefano's research interests mainly lie in international trade and industrial organization. His scholarly writings primarily focus on the organization of global supply chains, the pricing-to-market strategies of exporting firms and the quantification of the welfare effects of trade creation in gravity models of trade. Other topics covered in his research activity include the applications of asymmetric information to buyer-supplier relationships in international markets, and the optimal sharing rule/ownership structure for international ventures. His papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as European Economic Review, Economica, and Review of International Economics. Stefano was born nearby Torino and completed his academic training at the College Carlo Alberto and Pennsylvania State University, where he prepared his thesis for the PhD, earned at the Vilfredo Pareto School of Economics of the University of Turin. Before joining DSE at the University of Bologna (first as a post-doc, then as a junior assistant professor) he also has been lecturer at the University of Trieste. He is fond of football and history. 

Bruno Conte Leite, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/01 Economics

Bruno is an Assistant Professor of Economics and a CESifo research fellow. His research interests are international trade, economic geography, development, and environmental economics. He combines complex datasets with reduced-form and structural estimation to quantify the economic consequences of climate change and the potential role of public policies.    

Alice Guerra, Associate Professor, SECS-P/02 Economic Policy

Alice earned a PhD in Law and Economics from the Universities of Bologna, Hamburg and Rotterdam, in 2015, with Magna Cum Laude. In 2017, she was awarded a Marie Skodowska-Curie Research Fellowship as PI at Copenhagen Business School to conduct a cross-cultural analysis of tax evasion. From 2017 to 2019 she was Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School, then Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna till 2022. Her research spans several topics in the economic analysis of torts, with particular attention to illegal behaviors and dishonesty. This includes experimental research on tax evasion, corruption (bribery, vote buying), financial frauds;  empirical studies on tax evasion, cheating, addictive behaviors (gambling, smoking), judicial performance; theoretical research on the economic analysis of the law, including civil and criminal liability. She has authored many articles in international journals, such as Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Economics, Public Choice, Kyklos, Journal of Institutional Economics. 

Niko Jaakkola, Associate Professor, SECS-P/01 Economics

Niko is an environmental economist whose research mostly focuses on climate change: how should we optimally dynamically manage climate change, and how might we end up mismanaging it due to noncooperative strategic behaviour? His main tools are continuous-time optimisation methods and, in particular, differential games. He has published in journals such as Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Niko holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia.   

Sara Lazzaroni, Assistant Professor (RTD-B), SECS-P/02 Economic Policy

Sara is an applied economist, with research interests in quantitative Economic History, Political Economy, and Development Economics. She holds a PhD in Economic Policy from the Catholic University of Milan. She has been a Post-Doc and Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A) at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. Her research covers a diverse set of topics, including the role of shocks, culture, and institutions for historical and present-day socio-economic outcomes such as attitudes towards the state and political preferences, discriminatory attitudes, and economic growth. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Economic Growth.

Silvia Sarpietro, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/05 Econometrics

Silvia is an econometrician. Her research interests are Panel Data Econometrics and Forecasting. She works on estimation and forecasting of unobserved heterogeneity with panel data, state-space models, and heavy tails. She uses administrative datasets, and her applied focus is on earnings and firm dynamics. Silvia holds a PhD in Economics from University College London (UCL).   

Rossella Verzulli, Associate Professor, SECS-P/03 Public Economics

Rossella is an applied economist and her main research interests lie in the area of health economics and public economics. Her research is focused on empirical policy evaluation and investigates the effect of public initiatives on the behavior of suppliers and purchasers in health care markets. Her ongoing research projects analyze the effects of managerial incentives on hospital performance and the impact of information disclosure on the quality of health care delivery and on the elasticity of demand. Rossella obtained her PhD at the University of Milan and was appointed to a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Health Economics of the University of York. She has published in journals such as Health Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics and European Journal of Health Economics. 

Prizes and awards

  • Marco Fabbri (as PI), Hanna Frommel (Aarhus U), Charles Ibikounlè (U Abomey-Calavi), DanieleNosenzo (Aarhus U), Jonathan Schulz (George Mason), Rosaine Yegbemey (U Parakou) and Hervè Gbenahou (U Abomey-Calavi) received the “Cultural Evolution Society Transformation” grant (£90,000) for the project “Institutional Legacy and Policy Effectiveness”. 

  • Giuseppe Cavaliere was appointed Fellow for The Journal of Econometrics.

  • Marco Casari and Alessandro Tavoni have been asked to serve as Guest Editors for the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, as part of a special issue entitled "How are Economists as a profession responding to the climate emergency?". The deadline for submissions is 30 June 2023. 

  • Emanuela Randon was appointed President of the Scientific Committee of the Rimini Campus Library.

Participation in external events

  • 3-4 October: Emanuele Campiglio was invited to participate in the workshop organized by the Bank of Italy on the topic “The effects of climate change on the Italian economy”.  

  • 20-21 October: Emanuele Campiglio was invited to participate in the “First Waddesdon Club Research” conference at Chatham House (London) on the topic “The policy implications of Climate Economics Research”.

  • 25 November: Alice Guerra was invited to take part in the AIGA (Italian Association of Young Lawyers) National Congress at Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, with the presentation of her book “Giudici con la valigia: quanto costa il trasferimento dei magistrati alla giustizia italiana”, co-authored with Claudio Tagliapietra, Aracne Editore. 

  • 22 November: Roberto Patuelli was invited to speak about the economic impact of students on the Rimini Campus at a thematic council meeting of the City of Rimini. The results of the study, conducted (for the entire University) with Margherita Fort, Annalisa Loviglio, Stefania Bortolotti and Renzo Orsi as part of the HousINgBO survey, were reported by various local media (newsrimini.it, ilponte.com, riminitoday.it,corriereromagna.it).

  • 24 October: Marco Fabbri was invited to participate in “'WBEZ's Reset (Chicago - Illinois)” radio programme to discuss his article entitled “The ineffectiveness of 'observe and report' patrols on crime”, co-authored with Jonathan Klick.

  • 29 November: Natalia Montinari was invited to take part to the meeting “Women and the labor market: gaps, achievements, equality” organized at Sala Farnese di Palazzo d’Accursio (Bologna) by the Assemblea Legislativa Regione Emilia-Romagna, Unione delle Province d’Italia Emilia-Romagna, Pandora Rivista.