Currency, Central Banks and Regulation According to Donato Masciandaro
Donato Masciandaro enrolled in the DES program at Bocconi after a conversation with Gregorio De Felice. "We attended the same secondary high school in Matera. Then, one day, he told me about this new Bocconi program in Economic and Social Sciences". They have since come a long way: De Felice is Chief Economist at Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, Masciandaro is Director of the Ettore Bocconi Department of Economics.
His academic route started with a thesis on the independence of central banks, under the guidance of Mario Monti and Guido Tabellini. It provided the basis for a successful research – which has now over 2,000 citations – that Masciandaro completed during a year as a Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics, under the guidance of Charles Goodhart. "From that moment on, my academic interest keeps swinging from monetary policy to regulation. And so, while studying financial regulation I realized that there is an area that had not been yet explored by economists: illegal financial markets, such as money recycling and usury".
Monetary policy and regulation intertwine when Masciandaro works for institutions such as United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank and in Italy with the Direzione Nazionale Antimafia (with Piero Vigna and Franco Roberti) and the Central Operations of the State Police (with Alessandro Pansa). "Public goods can be threatened both in the case of monetary rules and in that of illegal financial markets. When I say to my class that the challenge is to study the fifty shades of gray – and, who knows why, attention levels rise when I pronounce these words – I'm referring to the illegal and criminal behaviors that emerge from a lack of transparency". Research continues in the monetary area too: "Studying central banks and monetary policies means measuring the redistributive consequences or the cognitive and psychological features of central bankers, or even if gender counts".
Since 1989, Masciandaro writes for the daily business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and he fondly remembers the brief and yet intense collaboration with La voce, the paper founded by Indro Montanelli. He brings newspapers and videos into classroom in order to comment on the events of the day in the framework of the course. He has just began the third non-consecutive term as Director of "the department with the highest rate of foreign colleagues. Not surprisingly, our official language is English. We are close in terms of values and diversified according to research fields. Academic life is stimulating in such an environment".