Dondena Centre Turns 10 by Addressing Inequalities

INTERNATIONAL ACADEMICS FROM DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES WILL IMPROVE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE EXISTENCE, THE ORIGINS AND THE DEVELOPMENTS OF INEQUALITIES, ON FRIDAY, 29 APRIL

Inequalities - in all their facets - are the topic chosen by the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy to celebrate its ten years of life, with a workshop that brings together some of the leading experts of the topic: Inequalities. Dondena Centre 10th Anniversary Workshop (Friday, 29 April, 2:30pm, Room Manfredini, via Sarfatti 25).

"The issue is in line with Dondena’s consolidated and internationally recognized specialization", says Director Marco Bonetti, "which is also reflected in a range of research projects on this and related topics. Indeed, inequalities represent features of and challenges for many areas of interest of the Center".

People suffer from economic, social and gender inequalities and many of them can be understood only considering the long term and can be countered with appropriate welfare policies. Thanks to the presence of academics with diverse backgrounds, the workshop aims to improve our understanding of the existence, the origins and the development of inequalities.

Among the participants, Branko Milanovic (The City University of New York) is a reknown  expert in economic inequalities, and former Lead Economist at World Bank’s Research Department. He’s the author of one of the most discussed books of the last weeks: Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Fabrizio Bernardi (European University Institute) and Richard Breen (Oxford University) are sociologists who study social stratification and its origins. Both of them explore the link between inequality and education opportunities. Raquel Fernandez (New York University) has studied economic inequality in relation to social and demographic structures - for example, the so-called “family inequality” which on the one hand uses the family as the unit of analysis, and on the other analyzes the relationships within the family to understand the choices that generate inequality between spouses. At the workshop, she will address gender issues.

The Dondena Centre, 10 years ago, was the first case of an endowed research center at Bocconi. It was established following a donation from Alberto Dondena, who wanted to remember his son Carlo, who had died prematurely.

Today Dondena is an international center for applied research, which uses an interdisciplinary approach to study population dynamics, epidemiology, politics and institutions, tax and welfare systems. Marco Bonetti is its fourth director in chronological order after Francesco Billari (who is currently Chairman), Vincenzo Galasso and Ross Macmillan.

The center has about fifty resident researchers and many numerous researchers from other institutions. The center's website is dondena.unibocconi.eu.

by Fabio Todesco