Alberto Alesina

Alberto Alesina
Born (1957-04-29) April 29, 1957
Broni, Pavia, Italy
Nationality Italian
Institution Harvard University
Field Political economics
Alma mater Harvard University
Bocconi University
Doctoral
advisor		 Jeffrey Sachs
Doctoral
students		 Justin Wolfers[1]
Silvana Tenreyro
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Alberto Francesco Alesina (born April 29, 1957) is an Italian political economist. He has published much-cited books and articles in major economics journals.

Background and professional life

Born in Broni, Pavia, Italy, Alesina obtained his undergraduate degree in economics from Bocconi University (DES) in 1981, then continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving an M.A. (1985) and a Ph.D. (1986). Alesina was then a postdoc and assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

From 2003–2006, Alesina served as Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard. He is currently the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. He has visited several institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tel Aviv University, University of Stockholm, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 2006, Alesina participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project.

He has published five books and edited many more. His two most recent books are The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline (2006, MIT Press), and Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (2004, Oxford). He has been a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for eight years and associate editor of many academic journals. He has published columns in many leading newspapers around the world. He is founding contributor of the online economic policy and research journal Voxeu.org and of Lavoce.info.

Alesina's work has covered a variety of topics, including:

Alesina is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, and the Econometric Society.[2] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.[3]

The Alesina-Ardagna paper

In October 2009 Alesina and Silvia Ardagna published Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending,[4] a much-cited academic paper aimed at showing that fiscal austerity measures did not hurt economies, and actually helped their recovery. In 2010 the paper Growth in a Time of Debt by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff was published and widely accepted, setting the stage for the wave of fiscal austerity that swept Europe during the Great Recession. In April 2013, economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was flawed, in part due to coding errors in a spreadsheet.[5] On June 6, 2013 U.S. economist and 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman published How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled[6] in The New York Review of Books, noting how influential these articles have been with policymakers, describing the paper by the 'Bocconi Boys' Alesina and Ardagna (from the name of their Italian alma mater) as "a full frontal assault on the Keynesian proposition that cutting spending in a weak economy produces further weakness", arguing the reverse.

Selected publications

Books

Articles

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References

  1. ↑ WolfersCV
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 May 2011. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
  4. ↑ Alesina, Alberto F.; Ardagna, Silvia (2009-10-01). "Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending". National Bureau of Economic Research.
  5. ↑ Herndon, Thomas; Ash, Michael; Pollin, Robert (2013). "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff". Cambridge Journal of Economics. 38 (2): 257–279. doi:10.1093/cje/bet075.
  6. ↑ How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled, Paul Krugman, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013

External links

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