Marco Le Moglie

I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Catholic University in Milan and a research fellow at CLEAN at Bocconi University. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto.  I am also affiliated with DONDENA, BAFFI-CAREFIN, and CIFREL.

Much of my research sits in the economics of crime. I study how organized crime invests in the legal economy, how crackdowns on one illegal market push criminal groups into others, and how violence and corruption feed back into migration, firms, and local development. Closely related, I work in political economy and public economics on corruption, populism, electoral incentives, and the quality of public administration when politics and crime interact. Across these topics I am interested in the same underlying question: how illicit power and weak accountability distort markets and democratic institutions, and what that implies for policy.

Outside academic papers, I run ASSIST Weekly, a free weekly newsletter for people who work with data, applied research, and the social sciences. Each issue points to datasets, pipelines, research tools, empirical methods, agentic workflows and working papers worth keeping an eye on. 

I also created Cosa fanno gli Economisti, a science-communication project in Italian that turns influential economics papers into short videos and infographics.