PhD board and Supervisor

Laura Anderlucci is Associate Professor of Statistics (SECS-S/01) since 2021. She got her Ph.D. in Statistics in 2012, University of Bologna.

The main lines of research are in the context of multivariate data analysis and they concern dimension reduction, latent variable models, model-based clustering with particular focus on mixture models for complex data, classification methods for high-dimensional data and deep learning. The methodological advances have been applied to different scientific fields, including medicine, engineering, genetics and textual data.

Overall, the results of the research activity have been published in more than 20 original papers in top international journals, including Statistical Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society – series C, Electronic Journal of Statistics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Statistics and Computing. She participated to several scientific meetings and specialized research groups with invited presentations.

Elena Argentesi is Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. She earned a Ph.D. in Economics at the European University Institute. Her research interests are in the area of industrial organization and competition policy, with a focus on empirical issues. She published on international journals such as the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of Competition Law and Economics. She teaches Industrial Organization and Competition Economics both at the undergraduate and at the master level. She also held training courses for competition agencies' officers and judges. She is Senior Advisor at Lear and has worked as a technical expert for several public bodies, such as DG Competition of the European Commission and other competition agencies.

Federica Bandini is Associate Professor of Social Enterprises Management and Accounting. She earned an ITP at London Business School, and a PhD in Management for public and nonprofit organizations at University of Parma. Has been the Director Director of Master of science in Management for Social Economy at the University of Bologna and Director of Social enterprise and NGO Master at Bocconi School of Management.

Teacher at Bocconi School of Management, Public Policy and Management Department and researcher at Cergas, Centre for Research on Health and Social Care Management of the same University. She is currently Director of the Executive master in Management and impact finance for social entrepreneurship.

Her main research interests are on public management, change management, social impact and business administration studies, with focus on social enterprises, hybrid, NGO and public health. She is founder and member of the steering committee of the Bologna University Yunus social business center.

Andrea Bassi is Associate Professor of General Sociology at the University of Bologna. He participated in the expert commissions for the drafting of the reform texts of the Third Sector on the appointment of the Minister of Labor and Social Policies. He participated in the Istat commission of experts for the Census of Nonprofit Institutions.

He was permanently invited by the National Council of the Third Sector on the recommendation of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies (2018-2021). Former national coordinator of the "Social Policy" Section of AIS - Italian Association of Sociology (2015-2018). He is a member of the Scientific Committee of Terzjus - Observatory of Third Sector Law, Philanthropy and Social Enterprise.

He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Journal “Impresa Sociale”. He participated in the Unibo research unit in the following European projects: InnoSI-Innovative Social Investment: Strengthening communities in Europe (2015-2107); COSIE - Co-creation of service innovation in Europe (2017-2021) (coordinator).

Beatrice Biondi is a Junior Researcher in Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences. Her research interests mainly concern quasi-experimental methods for the evaluation of food and health policies; demand analysis in the food sector; analysis of consumer behavior, in particular through discrete choice models and discrete-continuous models. She received her PhD in Agricultural and Food Economics and Policy at the University of Bologna in 2019; in 2016 she has been a visiting PhD student at the marketing and consumer behavior group of the University of Wageningen (NL). She published about ten articles in international scientific journals and two book chapters. She participates and has participated in European projects.

Pietro Biroli is Senior Assistant Professor in Economics. He obtained his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, and after that he was UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Zurich. He is a research affiliate at IZA, fRDB, HCEO, CHILD, CEPR, CESifo, and the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at UZH. 

His research focuses on the early origins and life cycle evolution of health and human capital. He is interested in Health Economics, Applied Econometrics, and Social Science Genetics.

Stefano Bolatto is Senior Assistant Professor in Economic Policy. 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. 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 import and export. Other topics covered in his research activity include the applications of asymmetric information to buyer-supplier relationships across borders, 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.

Daniela Bolzani is Associate Professor in Management. After 5 years of work in the domain of financial audit and of development cooperation in Europe and Africa, obtained a Ph.D. in Business Management (2013). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Departments of Business and Educational Sciences of UNIBO (2013-2017) and a Junior Researcher in Economics and Business Management at the Università Cattolica in Milan (2017-2020). 

She was a visiting scholar at Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado (2013) and HEC Paris (2016); visiting professor at JUNIA-ISA (2022).

Her research concerns entrepreneurial decisions, supporting factors and processes, with a focus on diversity (e.g., culture, gender) and social inclusion. She coordinates and is a member of numerous European and national projects on these issues, and has been a consultant for OECD and UN-IOM. She is a member of the working group appointed by the Rector on “Equity, diversity and inclusion” coordinated by Prof. C. Demaria.

Luca Bonacini is Assistant Professor (RTDa) at the University of Bologna and is a research fellow at GLO. After a period of training internship at the Bank of Italy, he received his PhD in Labour, Development and Innovation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2021. He was visiting scholar at the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and the University of Luxembourg. His main research interests concern income distribution and inequality of opportunities, with a focus on education and gender issues. He teaches Public Economics, Microeconomics, and International Economics at the University of Bologna.

Giuseppe Cappiello is Associate Professor of Economics and Business Management and Marketing at UNIBO. Head of the Advanced Training Course in Regulation and Market in public utility services, he is responsible for various research projects in the field of public utility management.

Michela Ceccorulli is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Bologna, Department of Political and Social Sciences and teaches International Relations, International Political Economy and Politics of International Migration. She is also Adjunct Professor at the Dickinson Center for European Studies.

Her research interests lie around migration, security and security governance. Among her publications, 'Framing irregular immigration in security terms: the Libya case, Florence, Florence University Press, 2014; with Enrico Fassi  (eds.), The EU’s External Governance of Migration, Routledge 2022; and with Sonia Lucarelli and Enrico Fassi (eds), The EU Migration System of Governance. Justice on the Move', Palgrave 2021.

Michela has also participated to several international and national research projects. She has widely published on security governance and migration in many academic publications and journals, among which European Security, Contemporary Security, Mediterranean Politics, West European Politics and The International Spectator. 

Cristina Dallara is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Bologna. She held a PhD in Political Science at the University of Florence.

She was Jean Monnet post-doc fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute of Fiesole. She has been involved with several international research projects on the role of the EU and other international organizations dealing with judicial politics.

Main research interests: Public administration and public polices, Organizational theory and behavior, International Judicial Networks and Global Governance, Judicial and Anti-Corruption Policies. She has published 4 books, 2 of which in English with Springer International and Ashgate/Routledge.

Elisabetta De Cao has been a Researcher in Econometrics (SECS-P-05) since May 2022. She obtained a PhD in Econometrics and Empirical Economics in 2011 at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome. She was then postdoc at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) for three years and then moved to the UK where she worked as a research fellow in health economics at the Centre for Health Service Economics and Organisation of the University of Oxford from 2014 to 2017, and as Assistant Professor in Health Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2018 to 2022. Elisabetta is IZA Research Fellow, Associate Member of the MiSoC center at the University of Essex, and Research Affiliate of the Dondena center (Center for Research and Social Dynamics) of Bocconi University.

Elizabetta mainly studies the determinants and long-term consequences of children's health and well-being. His current research can be divided into these macro-areas: (1) the study of the socio-economic causes of violence against children (from violent disciplinary methods to infibulation); (2) the influence of the environment and genetics on fertility; (3) the effect that exposure to air pollution in the first years of life has on the health and well-being of adults.  In the past she has worked on (i) statistical models for the spread of diseases and (ii) on the social and health impact of various international and Dutch NGO projects in Ethiopia. Elisabetta uses various methods of causal inference and data from both developed countries (especially the USA and UK) and poor countries (especially Sub-Saharan Africa) and of various kinds (large sample surveys, primary data, and administrative data).

Elisabetta’s research appeared in international journals such as  Journal of Health Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Population Economics, Labour Economics e Biostatistics. Elisabetta has been responsible or co-scientific director of several projects funded by British institutions (STICERD LSE, British Academy/Leverhulme, University of Oxford).

Luca De Angelis is Associate Professor of Econometrics at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. Luca's research interests include time series and financial econometrics, with a special focus on climate change econometrics and sustainable finance. Since his PhD in Statistics, he published in several international econometric and economic journals, such as Econometric Theory, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Ecological Economics, and International Journal of Forecasting. He is currently a member in several national and international research projects on climate risk and climate econometrics. He is also the Director of the Master programme in Quantitative Risk Management held by the Univeristy of Bologna and an active member of the Alma Mater Research Institute on Global Challenges and Climate Change (Alma Climate) of the University of Bologna.

Silvia De Nicolò is a Junior Assistant Professor in Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences. Her research focuses primarily on poverty and inequality mapping through small area estimation methods, as well as on evaluating the impact and targeting of public policies. She earned a PhD in Statistical Sciences from the University of Padua in 2022 and actively participates in national and European projects, as well as in national and international research collaborations. She has published in international journals, including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A) and the Annals of Applied Statistics. Currently, she is a member of various associations, such as the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), the Italian Association of Regional Science (AISRe), and the Italian Statistical Society (SIS).

Flavio Delbono, Full Professor of Economics, director of the master in Economics of cooperative firms (MUEC), program director of the bachelor in Economics and Finance, School of Economics and Management, University of Bologna.

Bachelor in Economics (Parma, 1982), D. Phil. in Economics (Siena, 1986), D. Phil. in Economics (Oxford, 1988). Main research interests: industrial organization, public economics, social economy.

Publications in: Journal of Industrial Economics, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Oxford Economic Papers, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of International Economics, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, Economics Letters.

Maria (Rosaria) Ferrante is Full Professor of Economic Statistics (STAT-02/A) at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Bologna. Her first name is Maria, but almost everyone calls her by the middle name, Rosaria.

Her research primarily focuses on small area estimation models for socio-economic indicators such as poverty, inequality, productivity, and consumption. She is also interested in regional and socioeconomic disparities in economic well-being and life satisfaction, as well as in the estimation of the impact of the firms’ choices on productivity.

Rosaria is actively involved in both national and international research collaborations and has published in international journals, including Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Journal of Official Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A and C), Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and Regional Studies.

In terms of teaching, she delivers courses in Economic Statistics at the undergraduate level and Poverty and Inequality at the master’s level.

Rosaria served as Chair of the University Quality Assurance Board at the University of Bologna. She has also been an “Expert of the System” for University Quality Assurance and was a member of the National Committee for the National Scientific Qualification of Full and Associate Professors in Economic Statistics.

Currently, Rosaria is the Coordinator of the Sample Survey Methods Section of the Italian Statistical Society and she is a member of several associations, including the International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS), the International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS), the International Statistical Institute (ISI), and the Italian Statistical Society (SIS).

Paolo Ferri (PhD in Management) is Associate Professor in Accounting and director of the Graduate degree in Innovation and Organization of Culture and the Arts (GIOCA). Before joining UNIBO, Paolo Ferri was lecturer in Accounting at RMIT University in Melbourne (2015-2016) and post-doctoral fellow at Stockholm Business School (2013-2015).

Paolo Ferri's research deals with the study of change and innovation in accountability systems among complex and professional organizations and has been conducted mainly among public cultural organizations such as museums, archaeological sites, and opera houses in Italy and abroad (Poland, China, Australia). Paolo Ferri conducts research through case studies, archival research, and automated content analysis.

He has collaborated in several action research projects involving municipalities, ministerial and regional agencies, and universities. Paolo Ferri supervises PhD students and postdocs in the fields of arts management, public sector accounting and management, and business model change in creative industries.

Gianluca Fiorentini is Full Professor of Public Economics at the University of Bologna, where he teaches courses in health economics, economics of regulation and welfare policies.  His main research interests concern health economics and law and economics. He has been involved in several research projects at the Department of Economics and the School of Health Policies. He has held institutional positions at the University of Bologna and in other public institutions. Since 2021 he has been appointed University delegate for the relations with the National health service. Here is an extended curriculum.

Martin Forster is an Associate Professor in Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences “Paolo Fortunati”. His research interests cover  the economic and statistical modelling of dynamic decision making under uncertainty from a Bayesian perspective and the modelling of inequality. His main applications cover the economic evaluation of health technologies and the impact of taxation and public policies on the distribution and redistribution of health and income.

Margherita Fort is Full Professor of Political Economy (SECS-P/01) since 2020. She received her PhD in Statistics Applied to Economic and Social Sciences in 2005, University of Padua and was Marie Curie Early Training Fellow (Institute for Social and Economic Research-ISER, Essex) and Max Weber Fellow (European University Institute, 2007). Since 2012 she is a research fellow at IZA - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). She has participated in CESifo activities as a research affiliate since 2013, and she has been collaborating as a research fellow with CESifo since 2019. She has been a CEPR Research Fellow since December 2020. She collaborated as a senior research fellow with FBK-IRVAPP (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies) from 2019 to 2021 and specifically on FBK-IRVAPP  training courses on policy evaluation. She is a member of the international network of experts on the evaluation of school reforms (part of the funded Project "Efficiency and Equity in Education; Quasi-Experimental Evidence from School Reforms across German States" by L. Woessmann, J. Allmendinger and M. HeilbigIt carries out its research in the field of applied micro-econometrics (mainly causal inference), education economics and labor economics. In recent years her research interests have focused on impact assessment of interventions aimed at children (0-6 years) and families. The ongoing projects are aimed at the design and evaluation of interventions aimed at children's families, the impact assessment of current programs (Girls Code it Better aimed at secondary school students) and the development of methodological tools in the field of causal inference. The results of the research have been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Labor Economics, The Economic Journal, Economic Policy, Health Economics, Games and Economic Behavior.

Riccardo Ghidoni is a Fixed-Term Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna and Extramural Fellow at the Department of Economics of Tilburg University. Previously, he was a Temporary Researcher (type A) at the University of Milano-Bicocca and a Post-doc at the Tilburg University. Riccardo holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on pro-social behavior and cooperation, examining the conditions and motivations that lead individuals to resist opportunistic temptations and achieve socially desirable outcomes. Several of Riccardo's studies concern environmental issues. Riccardo's articles have been published in international journals, including American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Journal of the Association of the Environmental and Resource Economists.

Andrea Guizzardi is Full Professor of Economic and Business Statistics at the University of Bologna. He has published studies on modelling and forecasting in tourism and finance. He dealt with both the measurement of satisfaction and the perceived value of tourists and the measurement of the competitiveness of businesses and tourist destinations, also starting from the fingerprints that consumers and businesses leave on the network. Further research interests concern the dynamic pricing algorithms, the measurement of the sustainability of corporate business travel and the financial trading strategies.Actually, president of the Clust-ER tourism of the Region Emilia Romagna. Since 2009 he has directed a lifelong learning programme (in UniBo) for corporate travel and mobility managers. In 2001 he founded the Italian observatory on business travel which he currently co-directs toghether with the directors of the digital tourism observatory (PoliMi). From 2021 to 2024 he directed the Center for Advanced Studies on Tourism (CAST-UniBo).

Lorenzo Masiero is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Bologna. 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.

Carlo Mazzaferro is Associate Professor in Finance at the University of Bologna. He is a founding member of the Public Policy Analysis Center of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

His research focuses on the issues of financial and economic effects of ageing population. He has published research papers on these topics in international and national journals. He has also developed a dynamic microsimulation model with Marcello Morciano as part of collaborative projects with the Ministry of Labor and the Parliamentary Budget Office. He has collaborated with the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Municipality of Bologna in research for the study of the personal distribution of income with administrative data and has participated in Visitinps research projects on the issues of analyzing the distributive and financial impacts of pension reforms through the use of administrative databases.

Mario Mazzocchi is Full Professor in Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences. He has previously served as a lecturer in Applied Economics and Consumer Behaviour at the University of Reading.

He is co-editor in chief of the international journal Food Policy, and a member of the Social Research Methods working group of EFSA. He has collaborated in multiple occasions as an expert on policy evaluation with FAO and the European Commission. He has led research teams in several EC-funded projects and international initiatives, including the national co-ordination of the Policy Evaluation Network within the JPI-HDHL.

His publication record includes two books, with Oxford University Press (Fat Economics) and Sage (Statistics for Marketing and Consumer Research) and more than 60 Scopus-indexed articles on a variety of applied economics topics, including policy evaluation, consumer demand, health economics, research methods, time series econometrics.

Gaetano Alfredo Minerva is Associate Professor of Economic Policy. His research interests are in the fields of urban and regional economics, industrial organization, and international trade. He has published in journals like European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Review of World Economics. In the past he was a member of the faculty board and supervisor for the PhD in Economics of the University of Bologna and he was a member of the final examination committee for several PhD programs in Italy and abroad. Before joining the University of Bologna, he was a post-doc at the University of Piemonte Orientale and the University of Pisa. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pisa and a Master from Université catholique de Louvain. He was a Honor course student at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa.

Antonio Minniti is an Associate Professor of Economics (SECS-P/01) at the University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). Currently he is involved in several national and international projects on topics related to innovation, health and economic development. His research focuses on the study of the forces driving long-term economic growth in industrialized countries, the links between inequality and economic growth, and the impact of innovation on the development process. He has published in several international journals, including Games and Economic Behavior, Economic Journal, Journal of Urban Economics, Research Policy, Economica and European Economic Review.

Natalia Montinari is Associate Professor of Political Economy (SECS-P / 01). She received her PhD in Economics and Management in 2011, University of Padua (Italy). She was post-doc at the Max Planck Institute of Economics (Germany, 2011-13) and she was Assistant Professor at Lund University (Sweden, 2013-16).

Her research focuses on the emergence of the early gender wage gap in the labor market, the impact of social norms in defining the career choices of men and women and the short and long-term effects associated to the introduction of affirmative actions. In the past she studied how monetary and non-monetary incentive interact with the heterogeneity of individual preferences. She mainly applies the methodology of experimental economics.

Overall, the results of her research activity have been published in more than 20 original articles in international journals, including European Economic Review, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Law, Economics and Organizations, PlosOne.

Rosa Mulè is Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political and Social Science, Bologna University. Her main research interests are in comparative political economy, comparative welfare systems, gender and political parties.

She has published several books and articles on political parties, subsidiarity, gender and political economy, regional political economy, welfare states. Among her recent publications, Spaces of subsidiarity. Diverging polities and policies, Special Issue, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 2019 (guest editor with G. Walzenbach); Varieties of capital and Gender Party Office in Italy, Modern Italy. 2021 (with Paola Bordandini).

Rebecca Levy Orelli is Associate Professor of Management Accounting at the Department of Management. Her research interests lie in the field of accounting as social and institutional practice with a focus on social and environmental performance. She leads the Sustainability and Circular Economy Lab at the University of Bologna and the Accountability section of the CERVAP (Research center for the public value at the University of Ferrara).

She published more than 70 journal articles and books, serves in the editorial board of Meditari Accountancy Research and International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age, and joins EGPA, IRSPM, EAA and EIASM international networks and SISR, SIDREA and AIDEA national ones. At present, she takes part in European funded projects related to sustainability (BioPlastics Europe, H2020), values (Uncharted, H2020) and higher education (Picasps, Erasmus+). She is Delegate of the Rector to the Budget and the Planning System at the University of Bologna.

Livia Elisa Ortensi is an associate professor in Demography. Her main research interests focus on the study of international migration and gender-based violence. She is member of the Scientific Commetteee of ISMU ETS Foundation (Milan). Currently, she is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project CERV-2022-DAPHNE "Data integration for acknowledging risks and protecting children from violence" (DORA), Vice PI of the project PRIN 2022 "Assessing the Vulnerability of Refugees and Asylum seekers in Italy" (AVRAI), vice of the project PRIN 2022 PNRR 2022 "Fertility over Forties - A mixed method comprehensive approach to understand parental well-being and trajectories of late and latest-late fertility" (FORTIES), local PI of the project funded by Cariplo "Between origin and destination" (BOND) e ricercatrice nell'ambito dei progetti and a researcher in the context of the PRIN/Cariplo project "Geography and Social Inequality in Italy" (GESI). 

Emanuele Padovani is Associate Professor in Public management & accounting at UNIBO, senior research fellow at MSU Center for Local Government Finance and Policy at Michigan State University USA, scientific researcher at Masaryk University of Brno CZ, and adjunct professor at Bologna Business School. His main research areas concern the financial analysis of the local public sector (local authorities, regions, agencies, subsidiaries) at a national and comparative level, management control in local public administrations and in healthcare, internal controls and the internal audit, performance measurement and management in the public sector. He has written about eighty scientific contributions on these topics, often with international colleagues. For over twenty years he has carried out research and advisory activities at major national public institutions, including the Court of Auditors, CNEL, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, and European institutions, including the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht NL, SFIL Groupe Caisse des Dépôts Paris FR, KDZ - Center for public administration research in Vienna AT.
He has lectured at various international universities including Aarhus School of Business DK, Aix-Marseille Université FR, and Management Center Innsbruck AT. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management and the International Journal of Public Sector Performance Management.

Sergio Pastorello is Full Professor of Econometrics at the Department of Economics, University of Bologna. His research interests are in the fields of Econometrics, Causal Inference, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Industrial Organization. His most recent work focuses on the effects of Artificial Intelligence on market outcomes, specifically the possibility that pricing algorithms driven by AI might lead to forms of tacit collusion, and the effects on market concentration and consumers’ welfare of Recommender Systems. He published in international journals like Science, American Economic Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics and Journal of Applied Econometrics. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Bologna and a DEA in Economie Mathématique et Econometrie at the Université des Sciences Sociales of Toulouse.

Roberto Patuelli is Associate Professor in Economic Policy and has a Bachelor in Statistics and Economics (University of Bologna, Italy), a Master’s of Arts in Transportation Policy, Operations and Logistics (George Mason University, USA), and a PhD in Economics (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands).

He has worked in Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA, concentrating on complex networks, regional differentials and forecasting of labour markets, commuting networks and regional innovation processes. Methodologically, he’s interested in spatial statistics and econometrics.

He has been the local unit coordinator for a FIRB 2012 project, and one of the Editors of REGION, the journal of the European Regional Science Association. He is currently overseeing, for the University of Bologna, a JPI-Urban Europe ERA-NET Cofund Urban Accessibility and Connectivity project on "Smart Mobility Hubs as Game Changers in Transport (SmartHubs)".

 Giuseppe Pignataro is Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Bologna. He works on issues related to inequality of opportunity and poverty in a broad sense, with analyses at the theoretical and empirical levels applied to different fields. His research is mainly focused on the measurement of inequality and the evaluation of the impact of public policies, with some insights related to information and educational or territorial inequality.

The research projects he is currently involved in analyze the impact of interventions related to social cohesion in the Italian territory, using administrative and survey data and theoretical and conceptual tools that can help explain the phenomena under study.

He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Public Finance (DEFAP) from the Catholic University of Milan and a Master degree in Economics (CORIPE) from the University of Turin. He is an external member of the Health Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) at the University of York and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Social Impact Agenda for Italy.

His research has been published in journals such as Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Journal of Banking and Finance, Health Economics, Social Choice and Welfare, and Journal of Economic Inequality.

Veronica Pizziol is a researcher at the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna. Her research interests focus mainly on behavioral and experimental economics, with topics including cooperation, prosociality, norms, and environmental sustainability. She obtained her PhD in Economics from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Currently, she is a member of the “Green Tipping” project funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, with Alessandro Tavoni as PI. Within the project, she leads the module dedicated to online experiments. In the past, she was a visiting researcher at the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making at the University of Amsterdam and previously worked at the Chief Economist Team, Directorate-General for Competition, of the European Commission. Her research findings have been published in various international journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, npj Climate Action, Journal of Economic Psychology, Economics Letters, Social Science & Medicine.

Stefania Profeti is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna, where she teaches Public Policy Analysis, Governance and Public Policies, and Local Public Services. She has been Director of the Istituto Cattaneo in Bologna from 2012 to 2015 and Co-Editor of the Italian Journal of Public Policy from 2017 to 2020. Her current research interests include public policy analysis, multi-level governance, local governments and public administration reforms, and local public services. She has edited and published 7 book on public policies, governance and the functioning of the Italian political system (Il Mulino; Rubbettino; Berghahn Books), as well as numerous articles in national and international scientific journals

Sabrina Ragone is an Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law of the Department of Political and Social Sciences, where she holds the post of Coordinator for International Relations.

She is Senior Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), where she pursued her research between 2015 and 2017. Previously, she was García Pelayo Fellow at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales – Madrid (2012-2015) and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (2011-2012).

She is a member of the Advisory Board of the “Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas” (GLPA), University of Houston Law Center Faculty, of the Scientific Committee of Istituto Cattaneo and of the Scientific Committee of the University’s “Collegio Superiore”.

Emanuela Randon is Associate Professor in Public Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. Her research topics deal with the redistributive impact of tax policies, the economics of gambling, positive and normative analysis of externalities and local public finance. She has recently worked on epidemic policies with uncertainty. After a Master in Economics at Bocconi University, she achieved a Doctorate in Economics (Bocconi University-Catholic University and University of Milan) and a Phd in Economics at University of York. She was visiting scholar at UCSD – University of California San Diego (US) and Teaching Fellow at the University of York. She is a member of the Advisory Board on regulated markets (Gambling Sector) established by LUISS Business School and Ipsos in 2021 and a member of the Clust-ER in Urban Economics. 

Veronica Rattini is a Junior Assistant Professor (RTD-A) in SECS-P/01 Economics at the University of Bologna and is an empirical economist. Her main research interests focus on topics in labor economics and public economics, with insights from the behavioral economics literature. Her research utilizes both experimental and quasi-experimental techniques as tools of investigation. She earned her doctorate from the University of Bologna and has conducted research periods as a postdoctoral fellow at the Departments of Economics of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Milan. She has also provided consulting services for the European Commission and Unioncamere Lombardia. She has received several research awards funded, for example, by the European Commission, the Federazione Cavalieri Nazionali del Lavoro, and the Emilia-Romagna Region. Her work has been published in journals such as the European Economics Review and Economics of Education Review.

Francesco Scalone is Full Professor of Demography at the University of Bologna since 2023 and Coordinator of the Master's Degree Course in Statistical, Financial and Actuarial Sciences. He is also an external researcher at the Center for Economic Demography, Lund University (Sweden). He deals with historical and contemporary demography, with particular attention to the use of micro-longitudinal data. His articles have been published in Demography, Population Studies, European Journal of Population, among other journals. He has been president of the Italian Society of Historical Demography (SIDeS) since 2021, was editor-in-chief of Population and History, and is currently Associate Editor of Genus and member of the editorial board of Population and Environment. He has taught demography at all levels and currently teaches population-related courses in master's degree courses.

Vincenzo Scrutinio is a fixed-term tenure track researcher at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on the impact of public policies and subsidies on the behavior of workers and firms. Specifically, his work employs causal estimation methods and leverages on large administrative datasets to estimate the causal impact of public policies. He serves as the vice-coordinator for the placement of the economics doctoral program at the University of Bologna and is a part of international research networks such as IZA and the CEP at the London School of Economics. He participates in national research initiatives and is a consultant for the United Nations and the European Commission as consultant working for Lear. His works have been published in journals such as the Journal of Health Economics and Labour Economics. He earned his doctoral degree from the London School of Economics and his master degree from Bocconi University (Economics and Social Sciences).

Alessandro Tavoni is Associate Professor in Economics. Prior to joining the Economics department at the University of Bologna, he was Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, where he led the Changing Behaviour Research Programme at the Grantham Research Institute. He has published in generalist journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in top field journals such as Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Nature Climate Change.

His research spans several topics in environmental economics, primarily related to overcoming behavioural and political economy barriers to cooperation in the (climate) commons. This is tackled through a combination of theory and experiments. 

Alessandro is the PI of "Green Tipping", a 5-year ERC Consolidator grant for which he will investigate the effectiveness of "Social Tipping Interventions" to scale up climate cooperation using game theory as well as lab-, survey- and field experiments

Federico Toth is Full Professor in Political Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Organization Theory and Health Systems. He is director of the professional master program in ‘Health policies and management: Europe-Latin America’, and co-editor of the Italian Journal of Public Policy (Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche, RIPP).

He has a long research experience in the field of health system organization and comparative health policy. In 2021 he published, with Cambridge University Press, the monograph entitled “Comparative Health Systems: A New Framework". He is also the author of four monographs in Italian. His research has been published in scientific journals including Health Policy, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law, Health Economics Policy and Law, West European Politics, Policy Studies, Public Administration, Social Policy & Administration, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, International Political Science Review.

Luca Trapin is Associate Professor of Economic Statistics in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna. Previously, he held positions as Assistant Professor of Econometrics at the Catholic University of Milan, and Post-Doc fellow at Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa and HEC Montréal. He obtained a PhD in Economics from IMT Scuola Alti Studi Lucca. His research focuses on financial econometrics, time series econometrics and extreme value analysis. He published in several international journals, such as Journal of Applied Econometrics and Annals of Applied Statistics.

Cristina Ugolini, PhD in Political economy, is Associate Professor of Public Finance at Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, where she teaches Public Finance, Public Economics and Health and social care economics.

Her research focuses on hospital regulations, primary care, health and social care integration, long term care.

Since 2014 she is the Head of the Advanced School for Health policy (SSPS). She is involved in scientific projects that in recent years have seen the collaboration of the Department of Economics and the Advanced School for Health policy with Italian public institutions such as the Italian Ministry of Health, the National Agency for regional healthcare services, the Emilia-Romagna Region, and some Local Health Authorities of Emilia-Romagna. Here for the latest publications.

Loris Vergolini has been Assistant Professor in General Sociology at the University of Bologna since 2021, he carries out his research activity in the field of policy evaluation with a particular focus on measures aimed at boosting university participation. His research interests include the study of inequalities in educational opportunities, social mobility and social cohesion.

Rossella is Associate Professor of Public Finance at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna – Forlì Campus since 2022. 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 is external affiliate of the Health Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) at the University of York and member of the Advanced School for Health Policies at the University of Bologna. Since 2021, she is member of the Scientific Committee that coordinates the online seminar series organized by the European Health Economics Association (EuHEA).

Alberto Zanardi has been Full Professor in Public Finance at the University of Bologna since 2001. Currently he is President of the Technical Committee on Standard Expenditure Needs established at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

He graduated from Bocconi University and received a M.Sc. in Economics from the University of York (UK) and a Ph.D. in Public Finance from the University of Pavia. He is a member of Dondena Research Centre at Bocconi University.

Between 2014 and 2022 he was a member of the Board of the Italian Parliamentary Budget Office. In the past he was a member of the Technical Commission for Public Finance established at the Italian Ministry of Economy and finance.

His main areas of research are fiscal decentralization, the evaluation of public expenditure policies and taxation. He has published articles in numerous international and Italian and journals, such as Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, International Tax and Public Finance, Regional Studies, Fiscal Studies, Health Policy, FinanzArchiv, International Journal of Health Care Finance & Economics, Politica economica.