Please see my full research statement.
My research interests are definitely multi-faceted. I
started my PhD program at the University of Colorado at
Boulder as a student of International Relations &
International Political Economy. As I progressed in my
academic career, I have expanded my interests to
Comparative Politics and even American Politics.
I have presented research papers at various conferences,
with topics ranging from political economy to the analysis
of mobility.
Here is a synthesis of my Political Science research
interests, publications and research papers. Please take a
look at my research statement (PDF Version
My main research interests:
▪ Mobility and Migration in an
American and Comparative setting;
▪ International Political Economy,
with a focus on finance;
▪ Comparative Politics in
general.
I have always loved the crossroads between economics and
politics. After all, the old say in Europe goes something
like "money is politics and politics is money". In the
sub-field of International Political Economy, I have
explored most of topics related to globalization, such as
international trade and international finance, with a
particular focus on constraints on national policies, such
as exchange rate policy and inflation management.
My qualifying paper for the PhD program dealt with
inflation targeting and how it would influence governments
of different partisanship. I performed a comparative
analysis of OECD countries and explored if and how markets
would penalize governments of specific partisanship and if
the practice of inflation targeting made any difference. I
developed and defended my qualifying paper with the help of
prof. David Leblang and prof. David Brown. I have also presented a
modified version of such paper at
the Western Political Science Association Conference
in 2006.
After reading Michael Veseth's "Mountains of Debt" I was fascinated
by this understudied topic (at least amongst developed
countries) and I decided to start researching on it. I
presented the results of my research at the
Southern Political Science Association and at the
Midwest Political Science Association in 2007.
The origins of my interest in the topics of mobility and
migration are somewhat more convoluted than what happened
for International Political Economy. My first contact with
the politics of mobility happened in my first semester at
CU, when I took the the American Politics and Policy class
taught by prof. Kenneth Bickers. A project that I
developed as an assignment for that class on mobility
using the Tiebout model turned into a paper that we
presented with prof. Robert Stein of Rice University at
the Midwest Political Science Association Conference
in Chicago in 2005. The paper, "Assessing the Micro-Foundations of
the Tiebout Model", was well received and so we
published it on Urban Affairs Review in the September
of 2006.
Right now I am focusing on researching mobility in a
comparative setting. My dissertation is exploring the
driving forces of intra-EU mobility in six metropolitan
areas in the UK, Italy and Germany.
In the meantime, prof. Bickers and I presented another
paper on the effects of electoral turnover on urban
mobility at the Midwestern Political Science Association
Conference in April 2007. That paper, "Tiebout Mobility under conditions of
Electoral Turnover" will be submitted for review
in Fall 2008.
At the Midwest Political Science Association Conference in
Chicago in 2008 I presented the following two papers:
“Migration, Mobility and
Satisfaction with Local Public Services in the
UK”, which is the paper-packaged version of the
third chapter of my dissertation thesis, and "Left no more: exit, voice and
loyalty in the dissolution of a party”, which is a
research on the schism of the former Italian Communist
Party at its 2007 Congress in Florence. The former
communists merged with the leftist former Christian
Democrats to create a new party. I am presenting a
revised version of this last
paper at the annual American Political Science
Association conference in Boston, August 2008.
