Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship in Economics
Held by Francesco Decarolis
Full Professor in the Department of Economics at Bocconi University. Previously he was Professor at Boston University and the EIEF-Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. CEPR Research Fellow. Expert for the European Commission, he currently chairs the Online Advertising Area of the Observatory on the Online Platform Economy at the European Commission. His research has been funded by multiple grants including two from the ERC (Consolidator and Starting), and one from PRIN, NSF and the Sloan Foundation. Expert for the Alpine World Ski Championship - Cortina 2021 commission for the assessment of the socio-economic impact of the action plan.
Joint Purpose
In 2013, the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation became a Strategic Partner of the University by establishing the Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship in Economics. Since 2017, it has been assigned to Francesco Decarolis, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. On the tenth anniversary of the passing of the Italian lawyer, the Foundation decided to invest in this important project to promote the best young talents engaged in research on applied economics. It is an endowed Professorship assigned every five years to a Bocconi professor with an undisputed reputation in their area and whose research interests include applied economics.
Core Activities
Research
The research that is part of the Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship in Economics focuses on various areas. Professor Francesco Decarolis has recently worked on public procurement, studying its effects in relation to the efficiency of the judicial system, corruption in selection processes, the role of buyers and bureaucratic competence. His research has also focused on health insurance markets in private health systems (e.g. analyzing the interaction between strategic insurers and prescription drug subsidy mechanisms in the context of Medicare), and the emerging areas of Digital Markets and online marketing, with a focus on the advertising market in the internet environment and competition in this sector. Thanks to his research on competition in digital markets, Professor Decarolis won a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for CoDiM (Competition in Digital Markets) in 2021, a project that studies the competitive aspects of digital platforms.
Communication and Dissemination
The Professorship's activities are enriched by the dissemination of Professor Decarolis's research results, thanks to his participation in seminars and conferences organized by the most prestigious academic and institutional entities. Professor Decarolis is also co-organizer of leading scientific events, such as the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association.