In all advanced economies, the public sector and institutions play a crucial role for economic growth and prosperity. State intervention can take various forms, ranging from establishing regulatory frameworks to directly providing public services and developing critical infrastructure. Additionally, the State can actively drive structural transformation by offering incentives or imposing constraints on specific sectors of the economy. Overall, the design and enforcement of the regulation, as well as the effectiveness of public action, significantly influence drivers of economic growth, including the accumulation of human and physical capital, the functioning of markets, and the level of business dynamism. Importantly, the quality of government intervention is neither static nor exogenous; it is shaped by political and bureaucratic constraints, the technological and organizational capacity of the public sector, and the availability and quality of human and physical capital as key production factors. All these aspects are the object of our annual Bank of Italy EPSI conference.
Preliminary programme is now available
On the 29th and 30th September 2025, the Bank of Italy organizes the 2nd edition of the EPSI (Economics of the Public Sector and Institutions) Conference. This yearly conference aims at bringing together leading world scholars engaged in research that sheds light on the above and related topics. This year we will host keynote lectures by prof. Guo Xu (Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley) and prof. Fiona M. Scott Morton (Yale School of Management).
We seek to attract papers of the highest academic quality on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following ones:
• Functioning of the public administration
• Public procurement
• Public sector employment and management
• Regulation and market competition
• Corporate governance
• Civil justice and corporate bankruptcy
• Crime, tax evasion and corruption
The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2025. To submit a paper, please send it to epsiconference@bancaditalia.it . Submissions should include a full paper. Authors will be notified by the end of May 2025. The conference will start in the morning of Monday, September 29th and will finish in the early afternoon of Tuesday, September 30th and will take place at the headquarters of the Bank of Italy, Rome.
Scientific committee: Lucia Rizzica (Bank of Italy), Audinga Baltrunaite (Bank of Italy and CEPR), Giacomo Rodano (Bank of Italy), Irene Di Marzio (Bank of Italy), Enrico Miglino (Bank of Italy)
Local organizers: Cristina Petrassi and Marco Romani (Bank of Italy)
Funding: The conference is sponsored by the Bank of Italy. There is no registration fee, and meals during the conference and the social dinner will be provided for all participants. Economy class travel and accommodation expenses for up to two nights will be covered for all successful applicants from academic institutions.
Meet our 2025 keynote speakers
Guo Xu is Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, a Research Associate at the NBER and Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). He also serves as Co-Editor at the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization and as Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy and Econometrica.
His work is at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and development. His publications feature all Top 5 economic journals.
Fiona M. Scott Morton is the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, where she has been on the faculty since 1999. She holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from MIT, both in Economics. She is also on the board of Editors of the American Economic Review.
Her area of academic research is industrial organization, with a focus on empirical studies of competition. The focus of her current research is competition in healthcare markets and the economics of antitrust. She has published extensively on top economic journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Economic Perspectives.
