Plenary Session (Salone dei Cinquecento)
Thursday, June 20th
Italian Contributions to the Advances in the Economics of Governance and Institutions
Maristella Botticini (Bocconi University)
Maristella Botticini is professor of economics and director of IGIER (the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research) at Bocconi University in Milan. She started her career as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics of Boston University. She is the recipient of a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, and an advanced research grant from the European Research Council. She is a research fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), as well as fellow, council member, and member of the executive committee of the European Economic Association. Her research interests include Jewish economic history, marriage markets in comparative perspective, and the empirical analysis of contracts. In the past few years she has been working on two book projects ("The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492," with Zvi Eckstein, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press and winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book award in the catefgory of scholarship; and "Price of Love: Marriage Markets in Comparative Perspective," to be published by Princeton University Press). She earned her Laurea degree in Economics at Bocconi University in 1990 and her PhD in Economics at Northwestern University in the United States in 1997.
"Institutions and Norms: Insights from History"
Can religious norms have a long-lasting impact on demographic patterns and economic outcomes? What is the role of communal institutions in enforcing social norms which in turn may shape the economic and social history of a population? We address these questions through the lens of Jewish history from 70 to 1492. We show that an apparently odd choice of religious norm two thousand years ago--the enforcement of literacy in a mostly illiterate, agrarian world, potentially risky in that the process of conversions could make Judaism too costly and thus disappear--turned out to be the lever of the Jewish economic success and intellectual prominence in the subsequent centuries up to today.
Nicola Persico (Kellogg School of Management)
Nicola Persico is a Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is also the Academic Director of Kellogg’s Public-Private Initiative. Dr. Persico received a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in 1996, and spent one year on the faculty at UCLA. He joined the Penn Economics department in 1997, where he was later granted tenure. He moved to NYU in 2006 as Professor of Economics, and Professor of Law and Society. In 2009-2011 he served as Chair of the Economics Department. Dr. Persico joined Kellogg in 2011. Dr. Persico has received a number of honors and fellowships, including several National Science Foundation Grants, and he was an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow from 2002-2004. He served on the editorial board of the International Economic Review, has been associate editor of Econometrica, of The American Economic Review, and of the Journal of the European Economic Association. He is currently co-editor of Theoretical Economics. Dr. Persico has published in the areas of economic theory, political economy, and law and economics.
“Exchange Efficiency with Weak Ownership Rights”
We show that the first welfare theorem obtains independently of the degree to which a legal system protects the rights of owners. We study an exchange economy regulated by a number of different legal rules, including property rules (rules that strongly protect the owner of an asset, as commonly assumed in economic analysis), standard liability rules (rules which allow any party to take the owner's asset in exchange for a legally-determined compensation), and even rules which protect the owner's interests very weakly (liability rules where the compensation level is set very low). In our economy, all these rules lead to exchange-efficiency. This result corrects a previous misconception in the literature, and yields the provocative conclusion that strong ownership rights are not required for exchange efficiency.
