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Services Save Lives
Erika Deserranno has won an ERC Starting Grant of €1.5m to understand which factors drive the success of digitalization in the public sector of developing countries, and how digital technologies can improve the efficiency and inclusion of public service delivery, leading to more robust and inclusive economic growth.
Breast Cancer Aid
The quality of life for women with breast cancer can be improved through careful and transparent communication and proper information exchange to enable informed and effective decision making. Bocconi’s research center CERGAS led a project, coordinated by Oriana Ciani with Vittoria Ardito and Natalia Oprea, which included a group of partner institutions investigating communication approaches and shared decision-making practices across Europe to improve the quality of care of breast cancer patients.
Chinese Housing
Chinese homebuyers routinely use informal credit providers to circumvent regulations intended to cool down the housing market, as shown in a paper by Alberto Manconi (Associate Professor at the Department of Finance), Fabio Braggion of Tilburg University and Haikun Zhu of Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Algorithms
The main idea behind Luca Trevisan’s short video is that, contrary to popular belief, algorithms cannot and will never be able to do everything. Algorithms, it is worth repeating, are the “recipes” that tell computers how to solve problems. Over time, computer scientists have invented and continue to invent faster and more efficient algorithms, and it is these ever more efficient algorithms, together with the development of more powerful computers, that are the building blocks of the digital revolution we are all witnessing.
Gender Pay Gap
The first video in the AXA Lab Voices series describes how and why a law passed in France failed to achieve its goal of reducing pay gaps between women and men, as shown in a working paper by Caroline Coly. A poorly designed law has given companies little incentive to solve the problem, and unions had other priorities.
Crystals
Soap films have fascinated physicists and mathematicians for more than 150 years. The disc we obtain when we dip the ring in a soap bubble tube is the film with the smallest possible area circumscribed by the ring and minimizes the surface tension energy needed to hold the soap film together.
Antonio De Rosa obtained a €1.5mln ERC Starting Grant to develop the mathematics needed to solve similar geometric variational problems, when the forces at play are “anisotropic”, that is, they depend on direction. An example is gravity, which pulls the soap disc towards the ground, making a slight bulge. In these cases, equilibrium is reached by minimizing an energy cost that is not proportional to the simple area.
Expectations
Expectations determine how households and firms react to economic policies. Economists often assume that agents have rational expectations and full information, so that they can correctly forecast the effects of any policy. This paradigm is now being challenged, though, and Luigi Iovino obtained a €1.5mln ERC Consolidator Grant to question traditional assumptions and better understand how we form expectations.
Temporary Migrants
Temporary migration of low-skilled workers to higher income destinations can represent an investment opportunity for those who, in their home countries, cannot raise funds to start their own business. A paper by Joseph-Simon Goerlach (LEAP Bocconi), Laurent Bossavie (World Bank), Caglar Ozden (World Bank and CReAM, IZA), and He Wang (World Bank), documented the phenomenon for workers migrating from countries in South and Southeast Asia to richer countries such as Malaysia, Singapore or nations on the Arabian Peninsula.
Healthcare for Migrants
Undocumented #migrants in #Italy make more use of emergency rooms and #hospital admissions than pharmaceutical prescriptions and specialistic visits. This is true even for chronic diseases for which undocumented migrants are entitled to essential treatment beyond emergency: hospitalizations account for about 50% of total expenditure for Italian citizens affected by diabetes, but as much as 90% for undocumented migrants, Elisabetta Listorti and Aleksandra Torbica explain.
Wage Inequality
Tito Boeri obtained a €1.8mln ERC Advanced Grant to study the sources of labor market monopsony throughout Europe and its effects on earning inequality among workers.
The restrictions on labor mobility that give monopsony power to employers are not uniformly distributed across workers: unskilled workers may find it harder to acquire information on alternative employment opportunities or be more pessimistic than other workers concerning the jobs they can find if they leave their current employer. They can also be subject to contractual clauses that limit their mobility, without being aware of them or being compensated. All this could exacerbate pre-existing disparities.
Aztec Economy
Spanish Conquerors did not themselves bring #inequality to the Aztec lands they invaded: they exploited the extractive institutional framework that was already in existence, adapting it to suit their plans and adding further layers of inequality, explains Guido Alfani (Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences).
Municipal Debt
Financial reform has the potential to bring about widely beneficial effects in terms of economic growth; but political and institutional factors can hinder them or even prevent them altogether.
Canaries and Crises
Old-time miners would have never ventured into the tunnels without canaries. The birds, more sensitive than men to noxious gases, would die sooner than humans in case of a dangerous leak, providing the miners with enough time to run for their lives.
In a paper with Tatyana Marchuk and Christian Schlag, Max Croce found that the same applies to industries: the more sensitive to certain variables are ahead of cycle variations and can be considered the “canaries” who give other sectors some time to react. They call them “leading” industries.
How Crises Spread
Financial distress can spread through the business network that links different firms at a speed that is dependent on the intensity of interfirm interactions. Empirical results show that, starting from the 80’s, the economy has lived in a critical state just above a tipping point, making distress contagion more likely and driving strong effects on risk premia. With Claudio Tebaldi, of Bocconi's Department of Finance.
Green and Media
When firms make their environmental policies public, they can get favorable media coverage only if their narrative carefully articulates signals of conformity (actions aimed at complying with existing norms) and distinctiveness (the adoption of a recognizably uncommon behavior).
A paper by Anne Jacqueminet of Bocconi’s Department of Management and Technology, Emanuele Bettinazzi of USI (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland), Kerstin Neumann of Innsbruck University and Peter Snoeren of the University of Amsterdam proposes a framework that seeks to explain which combinations of signals can generate positive coverage and which ones fail to.
Memory and Choices
Nicola Gennaioli, Professor of behavioral finance at Bocconi, obtained a# €1.9mln ERC Advanced Grant to develop a framework that explains instability across a number of domains. The key idea is to build on the psychology of memory and its relation to attention, highlighting the importance of salient features. A salient feature draws our attention and acts as a cue for memory retrieval, even if it is not very relevant. Information retrieved based on a salient feature shapes our beliefs, while other information is suppressed.
Local Executives
If you think that the executive labor market is a global one, you’re not alone. After all, it’s pretty common to read about top managers being hired to steer the fate of far-away companies However, recent research by Julien Sauvagnat (Bocconi Department of Finance) and Fabiano Schivardi (Luiss Guido Carli University) highlights that local supply of managerial talent is an underestimated driver of company performance and that local policies aimed at boosting growth should boost the supply of leadership skills.
Female Directors
Hannes Wagner finds that governance mechanisms that help align the interests of investors and board members enhance the environmental performance of firms. This is true also if a woman is appointed to a previously all male board. Wagner’s investigation is joint with his coauthors Alexander Dyck (University of Toronto), Karl V. Lins (University of Utah), Lukas Roth (University of Alberta), and Mitch Towner (University of Arizona).
News
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Cheng and Panico Win SMS Best Paper Prize
The two scholars have been awarded a best paper prize for an analysis of the relationship between corporate activities, startup activities, and innovation
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A Doctorate to Succeed in Research
The Bocconi PhD School presentation event introduced by Rector and Dean
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LEAP Offers MSc Interns a Taste of What Research Means
Students are recruited by the development economics laboratory twice a year to work with faculty on ongoing projects, with responsibilities in program design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation
Seminars
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Seminars
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Universal representation by Boltzmann machines with Regularised Axons
Universal representation by Boltzmann machines with Regularised AxonsMACIEJ LEWENSTEIN - ICFO Institute of Barcelona
Room 3-E4-SR03 -
Agathe Pernoud - How Competition Shapes Information in Auctions
Agathe Pernoud - How Competition Shapes Information in AuctionsAGATHE PERNOUD - University of Chicago
Alberto Alesina Seminar Room 5.e4sr04, Via Roentgen 1 Floor 5th -
Neuroticism and the Sales Profession
JOHANNES HABEL - University of Houston
Seminar Room 4-E4-SR03, 4th floor, via Roentgen 1