Lucia Corno

LUCIA CORNO

Lucia Corno is Professor of Economics at Cattolica University in Milan and co-founder and past Executive Director of the Laboratory for Effective Antipoverty Policies (LEAP) at Bocconi University. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), and RFBerlin, a Council member of the European Economic Association (EEA), and an Executive Committee member of the European Development Research Network (EUDN).

She received her PhD in Economics from Bocconi University and was a graduate visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) in Stockholm. Before joining Cattolica, she held academic positions at University College London and Queen Mary University of London. In the 2024–25 academic year, she was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Kennedy School.

Her research focuses on understanding the constraints to economic development in low-income countries, with a particular emphasis on harmful gender norms. She has conducted fieldwork across sub-Saharan Africa, studying practices such as female genital cutting, child marriage, and breast ironing. She is currently working on housing poverty and homelessness in Italy and the US. She regularly collaborates with governments and international organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of antipoverty policies.

She has received an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2020–2025) and a Fondo Italiano per la Scienza (FIS) Consolidator Grant (2025–2028).

NEWS: New book! Homelessness: Data, Prevalence and Features (with M.Braga and P. Monti)