I teach this course at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin in the "Joint Degree in Economic Analysis and Policy (EPOG-JM) in collaboration with Prof. Aldo Geuna (Academic Year: 2025-2026).

Syllabus:

The course aims to develop a critical knowledge of the fundamentals of the economics and policy of knowledge production and distribution with particular emphasis on university research. The course will introduce the students to the principal institutions and policies in the area of research and innovation in the G7 countries and other BRIC countries (depending on the interests of the students). Particular attention will be devoted to the comparative analysis.

The course is structured into four main modules. The first presents a brief introduction to the economics of innovation paying particular attention to the concepts of knowledge and information. It, then, introduces the rationale for public funding of academic research and examines the main OECD indicators. The second module focuses on the nature and evolution of technologies through paradigms and trajectories. This allows to bridge the understanding of knowledge in its manifold aspects with learning dynamics. This part is pivotal to the analysis of scientific production and the academic labour market that will be explored throughout the third module. The interaction between science and industrial development and in particular university-industry relationships, academic patenting and other channels of knowledge transfer are examined in the third module. Given the increasing importance of evidence based policy, one or two classes of the course will be devoted to the understanding and use of Science and Technology (S&T) Indicators for economic analysis and policy making. The fourth module (only for the students that take the course for 9CFU) focuses on the diffusion and organisation of innovation, the implications for the innovation-employment nexus. The final class on S&T policy will come full circle.

The course offers the opportunity to follow three classes by experts in the field.

The course provides detailed knowledge on the development and implementation of science and technology policies. Students will acquire the needed theoretical and empirical knowledge to critically evaluate market failure situations that would justify the development specific policies. The analysis of the rationale behind policy action and the problems associated with the development and implementation of specific policies will help the students to develop a critical knowledge of the difficulties inherent to the development of science and technology policy.

The course offers the opportunity to follow a series of seminars on the economics of innovation on Tuesday from 12:30 to 13:30 at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Piazza Arbarello 8 / CLE. Attendance of the seminars is compulsory. The seminars will offer the unique opportunity to get in touch with ongoing research in innovation.

Students (groups of two/three students can be formed) will be asked to produce a term paper enabling them to improve their reporting skills. The text should be placed at the cross border between academic research and policy report. Each student will be asked to present the structure and summary results of her/his work during the last classes. 

An Introduction to Agent-based Modelling is a doctoral lecture that introduces doctoral students to a theoretical methodology that is an alternative to the standard neo-classical paradigm. I begin with presenting a famous issue in all sciences, i.e., the aggregation problem. The discussion continues with a historical analysis of macroeconomics as discipline, providing students with the methods proposed by classical-Keynesian and neoclassical literature to solve this problem. A thorough critique of both schools of thought paves the way for the study of agent-based computational economics, which admits that some outcomes cannot be attributed to the conscious or unconscious behaviour of identifiable microeconomic components. This alternative paradigm considers the economy as a complex evolving system, an ecology populated by heterogeneous agents whose far-from-equilibrium interactions produce a collective order, even if the system structure constantly changes. In such a framework, there is no isomorphism between the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels, and higher levels of aggregation may lead to the emergence of new phenomena, new statistical regularities, and completely new structures.

I taught this course in English at the Ecole Doctorale Augustin Cournot at the University of Strasbourg (Academic Year 2023-2024).

European Macroeconomics is about innovation economics, technical change, and innovation policies with a particular focus on the European context. Firstly, I propose an evolutionary interpretation of technology and technical change, integrating various elements concerning the nature and structure of technological knowledge, sources of new opportunities, the dynamics by which they are exploited, and the results revealed in terms of progress in production techniques and product characteristics. The explicit recognition of the evolutionary nature of technological change has profound implications for how economists theorise and analyse a number of essential subjects in the discipline, such as the theory of the firm. The course includes both theoretical and practical sessions. The courses on the evolution of the following technologies are accompanied and enriched by the analysis of several case studies drawn from contemporary and past issues. For instance, the time-consuming implementation of continuous steel casting among advanced economies. I also discuss the differences between civilian and military trajectories in aircraft production, the role of patents in the pharmaceutical industry, the Moore’s Law in electronics, and episodes of collective innovation in England during the First Industrial Revolution.

The second step examines national innovation systems, broadly defined as the network of public and private sector institutions whose activities and interactions enable the initiation, importation, modification, and diffusion of new technologies. In this case, the analysis of the specificities of national innovation systems (e.g., France, Italy, Germany) is combined with empirical studies dealing with the emergence of a European innovation system after the development of the European Monetary Union.

Finally, this course assesses the theoretical and empirical literature on the innovation-employment nexus. It compares the relative explanatory power of competing economic theories while detailing macroeconomic, sectoral, and microeconomic evidence on the issue, with reference to advanced economies. The main objective is to provide a critical meta-analysis of both the theory and recent empirical achievements resulting from the relationship between technology and employment. Special attention is given to the technologies that characterize the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

I taught this course in English at the BSc. level at the University of Strasbourg (Academic Years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024). I shared this course with Prof. Amélie Barbier-Gauchard and Prof. Moïse Sidiropoulos. 

Microéconomie II focusses on tutorials (TD). The course aims to enable students to understand both consumer and producer behaviour analysis by modelling and quantifying their decisions, and to develop a critical mindset towards the obtained results. The introduced concepts can be used to quantify the responses to questions such as how a consumer should allocate their budget in purchasing different goods to maximise their satisfaction, how one can represent individuals’ tastes and preferences, given that they are subjective characteristics, and how production technology does create constraints on a producer’s production and supply choices, or more generally, on a company choices.

I taught this course in French at BSc. level at the University of Strasbourg (Academic Years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024). The main course was managed by André Lorentz.

2023-2024.  Sarah Pinel, Second year Magistère student and first year Master’s student Macroéconomie et Politique Européenne (Faculté de sciences économiques et de gestion, University of Strasbourg). Title of the report: "Robotique et compétitivité internationale : une étude empirique de la loi de Thirlwall".