Economic Complexity
An innovative, data-driven approach to economics, combining complexity science and machine learning. This methodology has been adopted by the European Commission and the World Bank Group for the study of about 70 countries. For more information about Economic Complexity, see here.
Some results of my research:
The introduction of a directed network of products and dedicated machine learning approaches to study and predict the industrial and technological development of countries and companies.
The investigation of the relationship between economic complexity and the escape from the poverty trap.
A multilayer approach for the analysis of the interplay among Science, Technology, and Production that is able to connect, for instance, the patenting activity of a given country with its industrial production, with a time delay of up to 30 years.
Evidence that firms that diversify their patenting activity in a coherent way have higher productivity.
For my latest papers, see my Google Scholar page.
In collaboration with the CREF Economic Complexity team, UNU CRIS, and UNU MERIT, we organize the Economic Fitness and Complexity School.
Former lines of research:
Econophysics
Explanation of extreme price movements in terms of microstructural liquidity crises and study of the connection between traders’ strategies and various empirical properties of financial markets.
Analysis of financial time series, in particular:
Introduction of a new stylized fact, particularly relevant for extreme events, and
Empirical analysis to show that technical trading leads to memory effects in price dynamics.
Development of a minimal agent-based model to extract the key features to explain the origin and self-organization of the main empirical properties of financial markets.
Tax Evasion
Application of complexity tools (networks, agent-based models, and Kolmogorov complexity, among others) to the development of new income assessment systems for the Italian fiscal agencies. Elaboration of an original algorithm for the detection of tax evasion.