Luigi Bocola Is the Tommaso Padoa Schioppa Visiting Professor for 2023

A PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY, BOCOLA WILL COVER THE POSITION FINANCED BY THE EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK

Luigi Bocola (Stanford University) is the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Visiting Professor at Bocconi for the academic year 2022-2023. He will be at Bocconi for the Spring 2023 semester.
 
Bocola is an Associate Professor in the Stanford Economics Department, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a Senior Fellow at SIEPR.
 
Professor Bocola’s research addresses issues in open- and closed-economy macroeconomics. Among other topics, his research has focused on the macroeconomic consequences of sovereign debt crises, on financial dollarization in emerging markets, and on exchange rate policies.
 
His research has been published in leading academic journals and has been awarded with a CAREER grant by the National Science Foundation and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.  
 
“The semester at Bocconi will be a great opportunity to work on two projects relevant to central banks, policymakers, and academics”, Professor Bocola said. “First, I will work on a project related to the role of trade credit for macroeconomic stability. In most countries around the world, suppliers of intermediate goods and services are also the main providers of short-term finance to their clients. In this project, I develop a framework to understand why that is the case, and to study the macroeconomic implications of these trade credit relationships. In the model, trade credit relationships are supported by reputational considerations, with firms having incentives to repay the debt toward their suppliers out of fear of losing that relationship in the future. So, changes in the value of relationships across firms - induced for example by an economic crisis - can lead to a disruption of trade credit linkages and have dire macroeconomic effects. I am particularly excited to work on this project in Bocconi as I am using Italian data in my analysis.”
 
“Second, I will work on a project to measure the degree of credibility in U.S. monetary policy. Over the past two years there has been a large increase in inflation in the U.S., and it is not clear to what extent this was purely the result of “bad luck”, or whether it was partly due to a loss of credibility of the Federal Reserve as an inflation fighter. This project aims at providing an answer to this question using financial markets data.” 
 
The Professorship is funded by the European Central Bank (ECB) in memory of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, one of Bocconi’s most illustrious alumni, among the founding fathers of the Euro and member of the Executive Board of the ECB from 1998 to 2005.
 
The ECB funds the Professorship with the aim of bringing an outstanding international scholar to Bocconi each year to pursue research and teaching linked to the theme of economics and European monetary policy.
 
The list of past Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Visiting Professors includes the late Alberto Alesina, Carlo Cottarelli, Kenneth Allen Shepsle, Fabrizio Zilibotti, Andrea Carriero, Eric Ghysels, Marco Di Maggio, and Sydney Ludvigson.

 

by Weiwei Chen