Marco Battaglini

About

Marco Battaglini is the Edward H. Meyer Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, obtained in 2000. His academic interests include Political Economy, Economic Theory, and Contract Theory. As a faculty member in the Department of Economics within the College of Arts and Sciences, he is engaged in research and teaching related to these fields, contributing to the understanding of strategic interactions, economic incentives, and the influence of political and social factors on economic outcomes.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Econometrics
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Law
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Effectiveness of Connected Legislators

  American Journal of Political Science · 2020 · 37 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Important work has been done to measure legislative effectiveness in the U.S. Congress and to explain the individual characteristics that drive it. Much less attention, however, has been devoted to study the extent to which legislative effectiveness depends on the legislators' social connections. We address this issue with a new model of legislative effectiveness that formalizes the role of social connections, and we test its predictions using the network of cosponsorship links in the 1…

  PublisherDOI

• Refining public policies with machine learning: The case of tax auditing

  Journal of Econometrics · 2024-09-23 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We study how machine learning techniques can be used to improve tax auditing efficiency using administrative data without the need of randomized audits. Using Italy’s population data on sole proprietorship tax returns and audits, our new approach addresses the challenge that predictions must be trained on human-selected data. There are substantial margins for raising revenue from audits by improving the selection of taxpayers to audit with machine learning. Replacing the 10% least promising audi…

  PublisherDOI

• Endogenous Social Interactions with Unobserved Networks

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We present a model of endogenous network formation to recover unobserved social networks using only observable outcomes. We propose a novel equilibrium concept that allows for a sharp characterization of equilibrium behaviour and that yields a unique prediction under testable conditions. While the equilibrium is characterized by a large number of non-linear equations, we show that it can be efficiently employed to recover the networks by an appropriately designed approximate Bayesian co…

  PublisherDOI

• Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2020-02-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We present an informational theory of public protests, according to which public protests allow citizens to aggregate privately dispersed information and signal it to the policy maker. The model predicts that information sharing of signals within social groups can facilitate information aggregation when the social groups are sufficiently large even when it is not predicted with individual signals. We use experiments in the laboratory and on Amazon Mechanical Turk to test these predictions. We fi…

  PublisherDOI

• <b>econet</b>: An <i>R</i> Package for Parameter-Dependent Network Centrality Measures

  Journal of Statistical Software · 2022-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The R package econet provides methods for estimating parameter-dependent network centrality measures with linear-in-means models. Both nonlinear least squares and maximum likelihood estimators are implemented. The methods allow for both link and node heterogeneity in network effects, endogenous network formation and the presence of unconnected nodes. The routines also compare the explanatory power of parameter-dependent network centrality measures with those of standard measures of network centr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: A Legislative Theory of Public Spending, Debt and Taxation

  NSF · $54k · 2014–2015

• CAREER: A Legislative Theory of Public Spending, Debt and Taxation

  NSF · $400k · 2006–2014

• Long-Term Contracting with Markovian Agents

  NSF · $142k · 2004–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Eleonora Patacchini

  138 shared

• Valerio Leone Sciabolazza

  92 shared

• Stephen Coate

  Cornell University

  47 shared

• Thomas R. Palfrey

  California Institute of Technology

  29 shared

• Roland Bénabou

  25 shared

• Salvatore Nunnari

  15 shared

• Jean Tirole

  Toulouse School of Economics

  14 shared

• Levon Barseghyan

  Cornell University

  13 shared

Education

• Ph.d., Economics

  Northwestern University

  2000

• laurea

  Bocconi University

  1995

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Adam Harrish-91
• Ravi Kanburh-71