Adda, a French Economist to Bocconi via Florence

THE SCHOLAR, WHO WILL JOIN THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, HAS ALSO TAUGHT AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Jérôme Adda will join Bocconi’s Department of Economics in the academic year 2014-2015. Previously, he held positions at University College London (UCL) and at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Adda studied biology at AgroParisTech and economics and statistics at ENSAE in Paris. He obtained his PhD at the University of Paris (Sorbonne).

Even though he spent a few years teaching in Florence, Adda and his family wanted to see what a real Italian experience in a big city is like. Bocconi is very attractive research-wise and is also a friendly place where Adda has some ex-colleagues from UCL and EUI. So, when the Bocconi offer came up, Adda could not go turn it down.

Adda’s curiosity about Italian culture and language will hopefully keep him going and soon enough he will master Italian. “I am the only member of my family not speaking Italian properly and the situation is becoming untenable,” Adda complains.

Adda’s research mostly focuses on Health Economics, Labor Economics and Microeconomics. Yet, being as curious as he is, Adda is often willing to venture out into other research areas. He is pretty sure that good collaborations at Bocconi are only a footstep away. It would not hurt if in those collaborations a few grammar lessons are passed on to Adda.

Adda’s main contributions include the effect of public policies on human behavior, the connection between income and health, and the role of human capital (meaning knowledge, skills, social and personality attributes, habits, etc) on career choices.

His latest paper looks at the effect of cannabis depenalization on the composition and level of crime and on social welfare. Adda shows that with depenalization there are more cannabis possession criminal offenses that remain high even after the policy experiment ends. In addition, depenalization allows the police to redirect their attention to non-drug crimes. As a result, the police are able to effectively deal with non-drug crimes and to reduce them.

Another interesting result in Adda’s research arsenal comes from his paper on the career costs of child-rearing.Career choices of women are influenced by their projected fertility. This means that before choosing their initial occupation, women try to carefully strike a balance between their preference for having children and the costs of participating in the labor market.

So, women put everything on a scale and then carefully choose their career based on their preference for having children. What happens after they have a child? According to Adda, they have to settle for less -fertility reduces women’s life-cycle earnings by 64 percent mostly because of lower participation in the labor market.

by Bojana Murisic