The New Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship
Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli supports the advancement of applied economics research thanks to the establishment of a permanent professorship named after Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli, to be assigned to a young Università Bocconi Associate Professor.
This morning John Elkann, vice chairman of Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, and Bruno Pavesi, CEO of Università Bocconi, signed an agreement which establishes the Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship in Economics at Università Bocconi, funded with € 2 mln. The recipient of the professorhip, for the first five years, will be Chiara Fumagalli.
"With this professorship", Bocconi's Rector, Andrea Sironi, said, "Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli enters the group of strategic partners which support Bocconi in becoming an international benchmark for research, studying experience and human capital creation".
"It's been a long time since Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli decided to concentrate its resources on research and education – from nursery school to academia – as the roots of our future. In the tenth anniversary of the death of my granfather Giovanni Agnelli, I highly regard Fondazione and Università Bocconi merging efforts to make the most of young talents like Chiara Fumagalli, working in applied economics research", said John Elkann, already a member of Bocconi's International Advisory Council.
The first Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professor in Economics is Chiara Fumagalli, an Associate Professor of Economics, who covers industrial organization, competition policies and corporate finance. In detail, she studies business groups' formation and workings. "Business groups", Fumagalli explained, "is a relevant research field, due to their diffusion and the share of production and employment they are responsible for. My goal is to study the peculiarities of the business groups and the way they face the different phases of the business cycle, also via their capability to mitigate the imperfections of credit and labour markets. The professorship will be an incentive and a motivation to go on exploring this field".
The professorhip is to be assigned to an Associate Professor of Università Bocconi studying applied economics, nationally and internationally renowned. The money donated by Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli flows into an endowment fund, whose yield will finance research. An Associate Professor can be the recipient of the professorship for no more than five years, and then another recipient will follow. The recipient will change also in case of promotion from Associate Professor to Full Professor.