HHB is glad to welcome Dr. Roy Van der Weide – Economist on the Poverty and Inequality Research team within the Development Research Group of the World Bank – among the HHB Fellows.

Roy recently assumed the responsibility of leading the poverty and inequality mapping research within the department. His research is also concerned with the empirics of inequality of opportunity and poverty reduction, axiomatic approaches to income measurement, spatial econometrics, and the transmission of price inflation and volatility.

He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, where his research focused on time-series econometrics and economic dynamics with applications to finance.

HHB is glad to welcome Elena Giarda – Senior Economist at Prometeia Associazione – as a new HHB Researcher.

Her areas of expertise are microeconometrics and tax-benefit microsimulation. Previously, she was Adjunct Lecturer in Microeconometrics at the University of Bologna and currently teaches a module within a Data Processing course at the same institution. She also worked as Assistant Statistician for the Scottish Government.

She holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Bologna, an MSc in Economics from the University of Glasgow and a BSc in Political Sciences from the University of Milan.

HHB is delighted to announce that Stefano Fenoaltea, Associate at CESMEP (Department of Economics, University of Turin), has become one of its Fellows.

Prof. Fenoaltea earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University and a degree in Law at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. He has held teaching positions in several universities both in the United States and in Italy, including the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, and the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. He is also a former Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, and of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Much of his research activity has concerned the economic history of post-Unification Italy, on which he has published many articles and, among others, the book The Reinterpretation of Italian Economic History: from Unification to the Great War (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

HHB is glad to announce that prof. Tito Boeri – President of the Italian National Social Security Institute (INPS) – is now one of the HHB Fellows.

Prof. Boeri is on leave from his position as Professor of Economics at Bocconi University (Milan) – where he had also been appointed Dean for Research for two years – and of Centennial Professor at LSE. His field of research is labour economics, redistributive policies and political economics.

After obtaining his PhD in Economics from New York University, he has been Senior Economist for the OECD for ten years, then consulting for the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the ILO.

HHB Working Paper no. 8 explores a new facet of historical household budgets: their potential as a source of information on women’s lives, experiences and economic activities throughout history. 

The paper focuses on women’s labor force participation in Italy’s last 150 years: despite its significance for the economic history of women, long-run evidence for this indicator is still uncertain, because official statistics fail to capture the full extent of women’s labor force participation as we go back in time.

This paper offers a first-time empirical assessment of the existing historical evidence on Italian women’s work, and constructs a new, adjusted series of female labor force participation, drawing from an eclectic collection of sources which includes historical household budgets.