GIOVANNI CERULLI

IRCrES-CNR

Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth

National Research Council of Italy

Unit of Rome

My name is GIOVANNI CERULLI and I am researcher at the IRCrES-CNR, Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth, National Research Council of Italy, Unit of Rome. I took a degree in Statistics and Economics at Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD in Economics at the same university.

Given my statistical background, I am interested in analyses based on econometric and statistical tools. My research interest is about statistic and econometric modeling, with a special focus on the econometrics of program evaluation and causal inference. I do research on machine learning and computational econometrics as well.

I developed some original models for quantitative program evaluation, such as models for continuous treatment, neighborhood interaction, as well as nonparametric extensions of existing models. In applications, my research activity has focused mainly on measuring the effects of technological policies on firm economic and technological performance. I covered also applications in sustainable development, banking, and epidemiology.

Currently, I am the Scientific Responsible for the NextGenerationEU project FOSSR-Fostering Open Science in Social Science Research (https://www.fossr.eu).

I performed several Stata routines for implementing program evaluation, causal inference and machine learning models. Furthermore, I developed Stata wrappers for R and Python in order to make it possible to run some machine learning techniques in Stata, thus exploiting the combined potential of the Stata, R, and Python languages.

My second related research area is agent-based simulation models. Indeed, I have been working on the role played by (bounded) rationality and coordination in modeling economic behaviors since my degree thesis. Part of my two-year post-doc experience at the IUAV (University of Venice) touched strongly on the (problematic) relation between mathematics and economics modeling. From a theoretical perspective, I am sympathetic with evolutionary theorizing, although I make use of what I feel to be compelling also in mainstream theory. I am also interested in economic methodology.

As of December 2019, the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) archive ranks my profile among the top 5% authors according to these criteria:

Moreover, RePEc ranks my profile in the 17th (17th according to the W.Rank) position among the Italian economists for the scientific production of the last 10 years (https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.italy.html#authors10).

I am Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics.

I am Associate Editor of the World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development.

I am coordinator of GRAPE - Research Group on the Analysis of Economic Policies.

I am author of the book: Econometric Evaluation of Socio-Economic Programs: Theory and Applications (Springer, 2015).

Last but not least, “social economics” is another field of inquiry I worked on. In my PhD thesis, in fact, I built a Social Accounting Matrix for the Italian welfare-mix system and performed simulations to see what a role an emerging non-profit sector can play.

I deem economics to be a social science, where the term “social” deals primarily with our moral responsibility toward mankind and our planet.