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Department of Economics

Newsletter Vol. 23 | March-April 2023

EVENTS

Massimiliano Onorato and Giovanni Prarolo have organised a series of three "JOBS" Seminars on non-academic job opportunities for students enrolled in First and Second cycle Degree Programmes offered by the DSE. The first two meetings were held in the Aula Magna on 6 March and 3 April. The speakers were Renzo Baccolini (financial consultant) and Matteo Scagliarini (CEO of Scagliarini Spa).

Visiting Fellows

New Colleagues

Enzo D’Innocenzo, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/01- Economics

Enzo hold a PhD in Statistics from the University of Bologna, Department of Statistical Sciences, and have more than 4 years of experience as a researcher in statistics and econometrics. His main research interests span across Econometrics and Statistics, including time series analysis, statistical inference and asymptotic theory of time series models, score-drive models, time series methods to option pricing and financial econometrics. Some of his recent works have been published in the Journal of American Statistical Association, Journal of Financial Econometrics and Econometric Reviews.

Veronica Rattini, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/01- Economics.

Veronica is an empirical economist. Her main research interests focus on labor and public economics, with insights from the behavioral literature. Her research exploits both experimental and quasi-experimental techniques as tools of investigation. After her P.hD., she obtained a postdoc position at the Department of Economics of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Milan. She received several merit and research grants, funded, for example, by the European Commission, Federazione Cavalieri Nazionali del Lavoro, Unioncamere Lombardia, and the Emilia-Romagna Region. 

Filippo Santi, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/01- Economics

Filippo is a development and trade economist interested in trade policy and public procurement. His recent research hinges in the impact of deep trade integration on both trade and non-trade related policy objectives and on the exogenous determinants of internal migration in developing countries. He uses both country- and firm-level data. In Bologna, his research focuses on circular economy and global value chain integration, within the GRINS research project (Spoke 5, WP 3), funded by the PNRR.     

Marta Giachello, Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A), SECS-P/03 – Public Economics

Marta obtained a PhD in Economics at the University of Genoa. Her research profile is linked to the topic of Public Economics, Health Economics and Pharmacoeconomics. Her main research interests are the Healthcare patiensts’ mobilty and its main drivers, the effect of social aids on individual health choice, and impact analysis of healthcare policies.. 

Filippo  Massari, Associate Professor, SECS-P/01- Economics

Filippo Massari is interested in studying how agents should learn and make decisions in various situations. His research spans multiple fields including Behavioural Economics, Gambling theory, Asset Pricing, Market Selection Hypothesis, Decision Theory, Information Theory, MDL, Safe Bayesian, and Game Theory. More recently, his research agenda is shifting toward evolutionary models, he intends to provide a theoretical foundation for many known "behavioral biases" leveraging the evolutionary idea that: “since the thing that grows fastest starts to dominate in evolution, everything we observe today is quite good at maximizing growth.” He obtained his Ph.D. from Washington University in St.Louis, worked six years as a senior lecturer in the finance department of the University of New South Wales Business school, and 1 year as an associate professor in the Economics department of the University of East Anglia. His work has been published in international journals such as Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, and Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.     

Lorenzo Masiero, Associate Professor, SECS-P/02 – Political Economy

Lorenzo is an applied microeconomist specialized in tourism. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Lugano, Switzerland and, before joining the University of Bologna, he was associate professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A substantial amount of his research focuses on stated choice experiments and discrete choice modelling for the analysis of consumer behavior in the contexts of travel, tourism, and hospitality. In particular, he is interested in studying topics such as the decision-making process underlying the selection of a tourist destination, the mobility choices of tourists within the destination, hotel selection of tourists and their preference for leisure activities and sustainable tourism products. He has published extensively in leading academic journals in tourism and transport, and he has secured research funds from competitive grant schemes funded by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong and the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights and Associate Editor of Annals of Tourism Research. He also serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Economics, and Tourism Review.    

Prizes and awards

  • The article 'EURQ: a new web search-based uncertainty index', Bontempi M. , Golinelli R., Frigeri M., Squadrani M. (2021), Economica, 88(352), 969-1015, is a top cited article in Economica (between 1 January 2021 and 15 December 2022), according to citation data from Clarivate Analytics.

  •  Elisabetta De Cao has been appointed by the Royal Economic Society Women's Committee as an “Academic Mentor” for early career female researchers.

  • Anna Montini was elected as the next President of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (IAERE).

Media

Participation in external events

  • 7 October 2022: Giuseppe Pignataro and Luca Bonacini have been invited to participate in the inauguration of the Study Room at the ER.GO "Carducci" University Residence as part of the Alma Mater Fest, by discussing the topic of Inequality and Economic Growth. 
  • 20 October 2022: Tommaso Sonno has been invited to take part in the meeting "Innovative financing for peace: towards a framework for peace-positive investments", organised by the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO) and the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), with his contribution "Are investments in fragile states peace positive? Review of available evidence”. 
  • 7 November 2022: Giuseppe Pignataro has been invited to participate in the first National Conference on the Right to Education organised by the Alma Mater, dealing with the topic of educational inequalities.  
  • From 9 February to 6 April 2023: Flavio Delbono and Stefano Zamagni participated as speakers in the series of meetings "The Contemporary Economy in 5 episodes" dedicated to current economic topics. The meetings were held in Bologna at MUG - Magazzini Generativi.
  • 24 February 2023: Anastasios Xepapadeas has been invited to attend the IAERE (Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists) Annual Conference at the University of Naples Parthenope, where he held the keynote lecture “Climate Change, Natural World Preservation and the Emergence and Containment of Infectious Diseases”.

Collaborations and other external activities

At the end of 2021, the collaboration between Ernst&Young Italia (EY), Maria Elena Bontempi and Roberto Golinelli (on behalf of the DSE) began to produce EY's first proprietary macroeconometric model for the Italian economy (HEY-MoM, Hybrid EY MOdel for the Macroeconomy). HEY-MoM is a quarterly hybrid macroeconometric model composed of 74 equations, of which 29 are stochastic and 45 accounting definitions. The model's forecasts are conditioned by alternative foreign and political scenarios involving 65 exogenous variables. The first aggregated HEY-MoM forecast was published on 19 December 2022 (ANSA press release here and further details here). EY plans to publish forecast updates on the quarterly numbers in the new EY Italian Macroeconomic Bulletin. The next step in the research will be to link EY-MoM’s aggregate forecasts to a disaggregated picture of developments in Italian business sectors (markets). Further enquiries can be addressed via e-mail to Maria Elena Bontempi or Roberto Golinelli.