HHB welcomes Maria Grazia Pittau - Associate Professor of Economic Statistics at Sapienza University of Rome - as a HHB Fellow.

She holds a BA in Statistics and Economics and a PhD in Quantitative methods in social sciences from the Sapienza University. Her main interests are income distribution, inequality, poverty, and polarization, nonparametric estimation and mixture models, missing data and multilevel models. She is also member of the Applied Statistics Center.

HHB welcomes Roberto Zelli - Professor of Economic Statistics at Sapienza University of Rome - as a HHB Fellow.

He holds a BA in Statistics and a PhD in Economics from the University of Rome, and a MSc in Quantitative Development Economics from the University of Warwick (UK). His research interests focus on the analysis of inequality, poverty, income mobility and polarization, mainly through the application of data mining, statistics, and modelling. He has explored the presence and implications of convergence clubs in the field of economic growth and has made several contributions to life satisfaction measurement and to the analysis of individual preferences for redistribution through hierarchical models, working also on time series analysis. He has also served as expert in the Advisory Committee on Statistics for the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

HHB is delighted to announce a research accord with the Bank of Italy. The agreement signed by the Bank’s governor Dr. Ignazio Visco provides for data sharing between the Project and the Bank, which has been collecting Italian household budgets since the mid-1960s. The Bank will also offer support for HHB research and take a role in the Project’s Advisory Board.

HHB welcomes Cormac Ó Gráda - Professor of Economics at the University College Dublin - as a HHB Fellow.

He is a graduate of University College Dublin and Columbia University and has published widely on many aspects of Irish, US, and Jewish economic history. He is the author of Ireland: A New Economic History (Oxford UP 1994), Black ’47 and Beyond (Princeton UP 1999), Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (Princeton UP 1999) and has also edited or co-edited several books, including Famine Demography (with Tim Dyson, Oxford UP, 2002) and When the Potato Failed (with Richard Paping and Eric Vanhaute, Brepols 2007). He has just completed a global history of famine (forthcoming from Princeton UP). He has also published widely in leading economics, economic history, and demography journals. He has served on the editorial board of several professional journals, and is currently co-editor of the European Review of Economic History.

HHB welcomes Anna Missiaia - Post-doctoral researcher a Lund University, Sweden - as a HHB Researcher.

She received a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics with a thesis on regional disparities in pre-WWI Italy. She is currently working on measures of wealth inequality in Sweden in the period 1750-1900 and on the effect of property rights on agricultural performance in pre-industrial Sweden.