Research

In my DPhil dissertation, entitled When The Leopard Meets Gatsby. Inheritance, Inequality, and Social Mobility in Liberal and Fascist Italy, I investigated the evolution of income, wealth inequality and social mobility in Italy, between the unification of the country (1861) and the 'economic miracle' of the 1950s, from both a quantitative perspective, and a history of ideas and debases on inequality and its "ideology". 

The dissertation has been funded  by the ESRC Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership, and a Scatchered European Scholarship of the University of Oxford; in 2019/2020, I worked on this project as a recipient of the "Giulio Einaudi" scholarship, awarded by the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Onlus (Turin); the fourth and final year, I was supported by a fellowship by the Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici (Naples).  

While the sources behind the estimation of social mobility for the interwar will soon be documented in the Fondazione's journal, jointly with my advisor Brian A'Hearn and colleague Giuliana Freschi we are explorign the possibility of investigating social mobility by means of special surnames, such as those of the foundlings.

From my MPhil, I have been interested in what happened to income distribution during the fascist period in Italy.  My dissertation, entitled A Noi! Economic Inequality and the Political Economy of Italian Fascism, won both the Feinstein Prize for the best master dissertation, awarded by the Economic and Social History programme at the University of Oxford, and the Francesca Carnevali Prize for the best dissertation in Italian economic history, by the Associazione Per la Storia Economica.

This work resulted into a working paper on top income shares and inequality in 1914-1952, that has been awarded the Marcello De Cecco prize. A revised version was included in my doctoral dissertation, and available in a revised WP version; I also aim at expanding the series by means of new fiscal sources for the 1950s. 

The project also led to a paper on the evolution of the Italian labour share from 1895 to present, published on the European Review of Economic History. This first, annual proxy of income distribution highlighted so far overlooked aspects its evolution in Fascist Italy, including the Great War, the 1920s and the Great Depression. 

To expand this first insight, and enlarge the analysis to aspects such as gender gaps and the relative position of the middle classes, together with María Gómez León  we proposed new pseudo-Gini estimates based on on dynamic social tables, covering the whole 1901-1950 period. With Edoardo Rappa, we are currently expanding the dynamic social tables to the 1951-1971 period, to estimate for the first time inequality in this crucial period of Italian history. 

An interesting fact with economic inequality in 19th and 20th century Italy, is that the issue was already a heated topic at the times. While scholarly work by authors such as Corrado Gini and his students and colleagues provided me with the 'primary sources' for some of my work, I have become interested in the intellectual history of inequality and its measurement. A first survey on measuring inequality in Italy from the late-19th to the interwar period was published in a special issue of History of Political Economy, together with other paper presented at the Measuring Matters conference, organised by Pedro R. Pinto and Nima Paidipaty. In my paper for Il Pensiero Economico Italiano, I expanded the discussion on the interwar decades. In the future, I plan to expand this work discussing "inequality knowledge" in Italy in the 1945-75 period.

In my dissertation I expanded this work in what is now the paper 'Non-competing social groups'? The long debate on social mobility in Italy (c. 1890-1960),  which surveys how economists and other social scientists have been discussing social mobility and related concepts, such as the role of inheritance and inequality of opportunity, in 19th and 20th century, and how this eventually influenced policy (most notably taxation). 

On these lines, I am working on a separate, shorter paper on the contribution by Maffeo Pantaleoni on the issue of inequality of opportunity (or "starting points").

A special episode in this intellectual debate is the "quasi-abolition" of inheritance tax (1923) - among the most iconomic reforms of the so-called "laissez-faire" period of the fascist period. This issue first attracted my interest when studying inequality in fascist Italy during the MPhil; after examining its "intellectual" history in the aforementioned works, but it led me to study the political history of taxation in post-WWI and interwar Italy.
First, I worked on the political history of the abolition of inheritance tax, thanks to the Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici: the result first came out as chapter (in Italian), in which I discuss mostly the newspapers coverage of the issue, and then into a LEM WP.  Together with Bruno Settis, we then tried to analyse the parallel debates on labour relations and fiscal reforms in the troubled post-WWI period - the so-called "crisis of Liberal Italy" - in a paper for Studi Storici. I am currently working, together to Fernando Salsano, to the taxation on business incomes throughouth the whole Fascist period. 

A related project, in which we use inheritance tax data to estimate wealth distribution, but also discuss its composition across Italian provinces from 1862 to the Great War, is the one with Salvatore Morelli, currently available as a WP.

Alongside my focus on inequality and taxation, I am increasingly working on different aspects of the economic history of Italy in the Fascist period. First, I had the chance to work on a survey, covering the cliometric literature of the last decades, as a result of a Workshop I co-organised with Marco Molteni at Pembroke College in 2018; the Workshop also led to the two special issues of the Rivista di storia economica, edited together with Brian A'Hearn.
More recently, I wrote a second survey for Studi storici, this time with the effort of linking evolutions in quantitative economic history with the broader historical debates of the topic, which hopefully will be out soon in an Italian history journal.

When working at the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, I started the project "Madly Poor", in which I am assembling a novel household-level database based to investigate whether poverty and insufficient welfare provision can explain the increase in confinements in Italian mental asylums between 1925 and 1941.

Together with Valerio Torreggiani, we would like to analyse in detail the impact of Fascist economic policies on the heterogeneous Italian middle classes.

Together with Alessandro Nuvolari and Caterina Sganga, I also explored the evolution of Italian intellectual property rights in this period, trying to discuss it within the broader issues of autarkic policies and their short and long-term impact on the Italian economy. This is an area in which I hope to combine the sources I have worked on for distributive reasons, in cooperative projects with colleagues working with different approaches.

With Bruno Settis, we are also working on an essay discussing whether Fascist economic policies from 1922 to 1934 can be seen a as instrumental for future imperialistic strategies.

With Nicola Amendola and Giovanni Vecchi (Tor Vergata), we have been working for few years on the historial applications of the Human Development Index (HDI), that was the topic on which they supervised my MSc thesis. 

We first co-authored a chapter in Giovanni's latest book for Oxford University Press, and then wrote a more advanced paper for the European Review of Economic History; due to the debate on Leandro Prados de la Escosura's book on this topic, we had the chance to also write a shorter note for the Rivista di storia economica/Italian Review of Economic History.