I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). 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
- March 2026: Awarded Russell Sage Foundation Grant for “American Preferences for Equalizing Opportunities Versus Redistributing Outcomes.”
- January 2026: Published in the Journal of the European Economic Association: “Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from the English Poor Law.”
- November 2025: NEW: “Preference Elicitation: Common Methods and Potential Pitfalls.”, published in the Handbook of Experimental Methodology, Vol I, (edited by Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv)
- September 2025: UPDATED: “Dynamically Optimized Sequential Experimentation (DOSE) for Estimating Economic Preference Parameters.”
- May 2025: NEW: “Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution.”
- March 2025: Awarded abilitazione (“habilitation”) for rank of Full Professor in sector 13/A1 (economics).
- February 2025: NEW: “Reassessing Qualitative Self-Assessments and Experimental Validation.”
- October 2024: Published in 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”.
- 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.
