I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna. I am an applied microeconomist, with research interests straddling Economic History, Political Economy, and Behavioral Economics.
My work in economic history is focused on the development of the British state. Several of my papers use the British experience to test theories in political economy, such as the effects of democratization on government spending. Another strand of research investigates the role of the state in Britain’s mortality decline.
My research in behavioral economics focuses on eliciting behavioral preferences in broad populations, as part of the World Econographics Project. In a series of papers we use data from incentivized, representative, surveys to investigate the relationships between different behavioral preferences, and between economic preferences and socio-demographic characteristics.
Updates
- October 2024: NEW: “Dynamically Optimized Sequential Experimentation (DOSE) for Estimating Economic Preference Parameters.”
- October 2024: Forthcoming at the Review of Economic Studies: “Looming Large or Seeming Small? Attitudes Towards Losses in a Representative Sample.”
- September 2024: Updated: “Willingness-to-Accept, Willingness-to-Pay, and Loss Aversion.”
- Jan 2024: Published in the Journal of Politics: “Gradual Franchise Extensions and Government Spending in Nineteenth-Century England”.
- July 2023: Updated: “Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from the English Poor Law.”
- Feb 2023: Published in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics: “Econographics”.
- 2022: Published in the Journal of Economic History: “Interest Rates, Sanitation Infrastructure, and Mortality Decline in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales”.
- Awarded the 2020 T.S. Ashton Prize for the best article by a junior scholar in the Economic History Review for
The Contribution of Infrastructure Investment to Britain’s Urban Mortality Decline 1861-1900.
