I hold a B.A. in Economics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and taught at Bocconi University and Imperial College before becoming a Professor of Finance in Naples. Currently I direct the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), and chair the Scientific Council of the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI) and the Scientific Committee of the Unicredit Foundation.
From 1997 to 2005 I directed the Research Programme in Financial Economics of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). From 2004 to 2011 I was managing editor of the Review of Finance with Josef Zechner. From 2011 to 2019 I chaired the Einaudi institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) and the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). Until April 2022 I directed From 2011 to 2017 my research was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant for a project on Finance and Labor. In the past 5 years, I coordinated the Naples Ph.D. in Economics.
My work has appeared in the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Policy and several other journals. In 2013 Oxford University Press published my book Market Liquidity: Theory, Evidence and Policy, jointly with Thierry Foucault and Ailsa Roëll, whose second edition appeared in 2023.