Presented the Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics

To understand the roots of poverty and to support the formulation of effective anti-poverty policies are the main purposes of development economics, the discipline of the new Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Università Bocconi, presented this morning in Milan.

Financed with a € 3-million endowment donated by the Fondazione, the Chair will be held by Department of Economics' full professor Eliana La Ferrara, an international authority in her research field already able to attract a group of international development economics researchers to Bocconi.

For Bocconi it's the second example of a dedicated and permanent chair with an endowment, in other words a chair whose scientific activity, teaching and dissemination is financed with the proceeds of an endowment, donated for philanthropic ends by an individual or company and invested by Università Bocconi.

"In the last 20 years", La Ferrara explains, "development economics has radically changed from a mainly theory dominated field to a discipline which widely uses empirical methods. The unifying methodological approach of the Chair will be that of adopting a microeconomic approach that starts from a understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of individual and collective behavior to derive testable empirical implications".

The Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi was officially established in 1991 with a statute that sets the improvement of people and societies as its goals. Since the beginning the Fondazione has generously funded Milanese universities.

"Università Bocconi", the rector, Guido Tabellini, says, "has to profoundly acknowledge the Fondazione, and not only because it has financed this chair. In the last years Fondazione's funds financed the research of our strategic centres, provided grants for outstanding students and supported the international recruitment campaign of senior professors coming from foreign universities".