MICROPOPULISM aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the micro-foundations of populism in order to gain a granular understanding of populist rhetoric that can undermine European values, as well as the drivers of this rhetoric and its economic consequences. Management scholars have made progress in understanding the co-evolution of organizations and institutions. Their contributions only peripherally touch upon macro-institutions and ignore the rhetoric element of institutional change. I want to fill this gap and provide a better understanding of how organizations construct macro-institutions, and to conflate co-evolution theory and discourse analysis. This research project takes plays in the context of populism and multinational enterprises (MNEs): MNEs are powerful organizations that shape globalization forces and economic developments. Populism defines political institutions and contains a central rhetoric element as populists frame the political debate. I will delve into discourse analysis and the rhetoric of populists to accommodate the varieties of their ideas. The analysis of speeches, press releases, or social media posts of populists should enlarge the comprehension of the micro-foundations of macro-institutions, and allow for an integration of discourse into co-evolution theory. I will also draw on hierarchical-linear modelling to explore the co-evolutionary causalities between organizations and macro-institutions. MICROPOPULISM will last 24 months and will be conducted at Luiss Guido Carli (Italy) under the supervision of Prof. Antonio Majocchi, an expert in institutions, MNEs, and economic performance. Luiss focuses on political science and management studies and is an ideal institution for accommodating the interdisciplinary nature of this research project. Results of this project are relevant for different societal groups and will thus be disseminated and communicated to the academic community, policy makers, industry, and general public.

The last two decades have witnessed substantial progress in the measurement of productivity. However, our understanding of the deep determinants of productivity growth is still limited. This is important in the face of both the global productivity slowdown emerged since mid 2000s and the large productivity growth divide in Continental Europe between the North and the South. I hypothesize that ownership, control and finance (in short "industrial structure'', IS) play a key role and that their importance, due to technological change, has grown over time. I plan to merge insights and state-of-the-art techniques from industrial organization and corporate finance to assess the causes and consequences of different ISs. Methodologically, I will use a combination of unique data sources (credit register, matched employer-employee data, firm input-output relationships), quasi-experimental design (changes in the banking regulation, executives mortality shocks in local labor markets) as well as structural techniques (selection models and Bayesian learning models) to address the fundamental identification issues that plague the literature. I also plan a major data collection effort in four European countries to study succession in family firms. The project will pursue four specific objectives in four deeply integrated work packages: a) The role of firm ownership and control on skill acquisition and risk taking; b) Skills supply: the effects of the education of entrepreneurs and managers; c) Industrial structure, input/outut relationships and IT adoption; d) Access to finance with asymmetric information and imperfectly competitive financial markets. The ambition is to generate a discontinuous change in our understanding of the relationship between corporate governance/finance and productivity growth. On the way, I expect to contribute to the key debate for the future of the European Union on the diverging productivity performance of European economies.

A main challenge for modern macroeconomics is to understand the consequences of the sizeable heterogeneity across households and firms, a feature ignored by textbook representative-agent models. Important questions arise on the role that such heterogeneity plays in the workings of the economy and its ability to respond to shocks in the presence of frictions and lumpy behavior (infrequent large adjustments), as is the case for durable purchases, technology adoption, portfolio adjustments, investment and price re-setting. We develop new methods to characterize the equilibrium dynamics of rich distributions, for a rigorous understanding of the forces that impinge on the aggregate economic behavior in the presence of realistic heterogeneity. We apply the methods to two set of macroeconomic problems. First, mapping models to data and the economy’s response to shocks. For a broad class of models with lumpy behavior we analyze aggregation and develop methods to identify and quantify the fundamental frictions the agents face. The methods will be used to characterize the economy's response to aggregate shocks and identify the cross section features that matter (and those that do not) in shaping the aggregate response. Applications concern investment, labor and housing markets, inequality and growth, and new-keynesian models. Second, a rigorous analysis of dynamic strategic complementarities and network effects. The dependence of one agent's decision on what other agents do is key in modelling aggregate dynamics and relevant in reality. For instance, a firm may be slow to react to a shock because other firms have not yet reacted. To date there are no results to guide us in the analysis of such complementarities in dynamic models with heterogeneity. Several applications, including the amplification of monetary nonneutrality, and the dynamic network effects of introducing e.g. central bank digital currency, will be explored.