Carlo Alberto Medal 2007: NICOLA PERSICO

The Collegio Carlo Alberto has instituted the annual Carlo Alberto Medal to be awarded to a young Italian economist (resident in Italy or abroad) under the age of 40 for his/her outstanding research contributions to the field of economics.

The selection process consisted of two stages (click here for more details).

The winner of the first Carlo Alberto Medal is Nicola Persico, Professor of Economics and Professor of Law and Society at New York University.

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Born in Palermo on September 1, 1967, Nicola Persico holds a Laurea degree in Economics from Bocconi University (supervisor: Luigi Montrucchio), and a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in the United States. After one year as an assistant professor at UCLA, since 1997 he has worked at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and he is a Selected Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

He has received a number of honors and fellowships, including four National Science Foundation Research Grants, and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship for 2002-2004.

Motivation 
With many articles published in top journals in Economics (American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Review of Economic Studies), Nicola Persico has given outstanding contributions in three areas: Political Economy, Economics of Discrimination, and Information Economics. The two salient features of his research are: (i) the breadth of his contributions, read and cited by economists working on theoretical and applied topics, political scientists, lawyers and law and economics scholars, historians and constitutional scholars. Some of his work is the best example of clever use of theory to place structure and interpretation on data that would be hard to interpret absent a model. (ii) The depth and long-lasting impact of his works on the way scholars think in these disciplines. Some of these works have been written in collaboration with Alessandro Lizzeri, Professor of Economics at New York University.

The Carlo Alberto Lecture
On June 13, 2007, Nicola Persico will deliver the Carlo Alberto Lecture at the Collegio, in the same week of the Pareto Lectures. On June 12 and 14, respectively, Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Jean Tirole (IDEI, Toulouse) will deliver the first Vilfredo Pareto Lectures in Economics and Social Sciences through which the Collegio aims to honor Pareto (1848-1923), alumnus of the University and the Politecnico of Torino and a towering figure in the social sciences.