About

Alberto Alesina was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He was a leader in the field of Political Economics and published extensively in all major academic journals in economics. He authored five books and edited many more, with his two most recent books being The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline, published by MIT Press, and Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, published by Oxford University Press. Alesina served as a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for eight years and was an associate editor of many academic journals. Born in Italy in 1957, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1986 and served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2003 to 2006. He was a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work covered a variety of topics including political business cycles, fiscal policy, European integration, stabilization policies, currency unions, redistributive policies, welfare state differences between the US and Europe, electoral systems, and the economic systems of the US and Europe. He published columns in many leading newspapers and visited several institutions such as MIT, Tel Aviv University, the University of Stockholm, the World Bank, and the IMF.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Political economy
• Computer Security
• Law
• Development economics
• Demography
• Economic growth
• Market economy
• Geography
• Demographic economics
• Economic geography
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Austerity and elections

  Economica · 2024-05-23 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract This paper revisits the conventional but unproven wisdom that voters penalize governments for adopting fiscal austerity in a sample of advanced economies. We consider the composition of the austerity package and the economic manifesto of the implementing government, and find that austerity packages consisting mostly of tax hikes have a significant electoral cost, which is larger for government parties that campaigned on a free‐market manifesto. Conversely, expenditure‐based austerity is costlier for government parties that did not run on a small‐government platform, but may be beneficial for those that did.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools

  American Economic Review · 2024-06-27 · 29 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study how people change their behavior after being made aware of bias. Teachers in Italian schools give lower grades to immigrant students relative to natives of comparable ability. In two experiments, we reveal to teachers their own stereotypes, measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the first, we find that learning one’s IAT before assigning grades reduces the native-immigrant grade gap. In the second, IAT disclosure and generic debiasing have similar average effects, but there is heterogeneity: teachers with stronger negative stereotypes do not respond to generic debiasing but change their behavior when informed about their own IAT. (JEL D91, I24, J15, J45)

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2024-03-01 · 94 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash, increasing support for anti-immigrant parties and lowering preferences for redistribution and diversity among natives. Next, we unpack the channels behind the political effects of immigration, distinguishing between economic and noneconomic forces. In examining the mechanisms, we highlight important mediating factors, such as misperceptions, the media, and the conditions under which intergroup contact occurs. We also outline promising avenues for future research. (JEL D72, H23, J11, J15, K37, R23, Z13)

  PublisherDOI

• Correction To: Structural Reforms and Elections: Evidence from a World-Wide New Dataset

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2024-03-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Religion and educational mobility in Africa

  Nature · 2023-05-17 · 40 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract The African people and leaders 1,2 have long seen education as a driving force of development and liberation, a view shared by international institutions 3,4 , as schooling has large economic and non-economic returns, particularly in low-income settings 5 . In this study, we examine the educational progress across faiths throughout postcolonial Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities. We construct comprehensive religion-specific measures of intergenerational mobility in education using census data from 2,286 districts in 21 countries and document the following. First, Christians have better mobility outcomes than Traditionalists and Muslims. Second, differences in intergenerational mobility between Christians and Muslims persist among those residing in the same district, in households with comparable economic and family backgrounds. Third, although Muslims benefit as much as Christians when they move early in life to high-mobility regions, they are less likely to do so. Their low internal mobility accentuates the educational deficit, as Muslims reside on average in areas that are less urbanized and more remote with limited infrastructure. Fourth, the Christian–Muslim gap is most prominent in areas with large Muslim communities, where the latter also register the lowest emigration rates. As African governments and international organizations invest heavily in educational programmes, our findings highlight the need to understand better the private and social returns to schooling across faiths in religiously segregated communities and to carefully think about religious inequalities in the take-up of educational policies 6 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Index

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-05-12

  paratextOpen access

  Covering global, comparative, and single-country contexts, this Research Handbook presents wide-ranging, cutting-edge research on poverty and inequality. It maps out international trends in poverty and inequality and explores the key conceptual and operational frameworks, practical analyses, and policy applications and outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author Correction: Religion and educational mobility in Africa

  Nature · 2023-12-12

  erratumOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural Reforms and Elections: Evidence from a World-Wide New Dataset

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2023-12-23 · 35 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We present two new databases we have constructed to explore the electoral consequences of structural economic policy reforms. One database measures reforms in domestic finance, external finance, trade, product, and labor markets covering 90 advanced and developing economies from 1973 to 2014. The other chronicles the timing and results of national elections. We find that liberalizing reforms are associated with economic benefits that accrue only gradually over time. Because of this delay, liberalizing reforms are costly to democratic incumbents when they are implemented close to elections. Electoral outcomes also depend on the state of the economy: Reforms are penalized during contractions but are often rewarded in expansions.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Package for Immigration and Redistribution

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022-01-18

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package for Immigration and Redistribution by Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The package contains all the survey data and the data on actual statistics about immigrants and non-immigrants, as well as the scripts needed to replicate the figures and tables in the paper. The package also contains three excel files detailing how we computed the actual statistics and the sources we used.

  PublisherDOI

• Immigration and Redistribution

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2022-03-10 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Does immigration change support for redistribution? We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how people perceive immigrants and how these perceptions influence their support for redistribution. We find striking misperceptions about the number and characteristics of immigrants. In all countries, respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and economically weaker—less educated, more unemployed, and more reliant on and favoured by government transfers—than they actually are. In the experimental part of our article, we show that simply making respondents think about immigration before asking questions about redistribution makes them support less redistribution, including actual donations to charities. The perception that immigrants are economically weaker and more likely to take advantage of the welfare system is strongly correlated with lower support for redistribution, much more so than the perceived cultural distance or the perceived share of immigrants. These findings are confirmed by further experimental evidence. Information about the true shares and origins of immigrants does not change support for redistribution. An anecdote about a “hard-working” immigrant has somewhat stronger effects but is unable to counteract the negative priming effect of making people think about immigration. Our results further suggest that narratives shape people’s views on immigration more deeply than hard facts.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paola Giuliano

  263 shared

• Francesco Giavazzi

  238 shared

• Guido Tabellini

  Bocconi University

  192 shared

• Carlo A. Favero

  Centre for Economic Policy Research

  184 shared

• Francesco Trebbi

  147 shared

• Roberto Perotti

  143 shared

• Philippe Aghion

  Collège de France

  119 shared

• Silvia Ardagna

  82 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1985

• B.A., Economics

  University of Rome 'La Sapienza'

  1980

Awards & honors

• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Member of the Econometric Society