In a collaborative effort between the Center for Italian Studies, the Nanovic Institute, and the College of Arts and Letters, Notre Dame welcomes Marco Grazzi as the current Italian Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Science for the spring semester. Grazzi is Full Professor in the Dipartimento di Politica Economica at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy.
His research focuses on the role of firms in shaping aggregate industry and country dynamics. To this end, his works embrace a number of fields such as international trade, firm growth and its relation to innovation, and the analysis of production, both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. His current projects focus on the role of new technologies and international trade in shaping firm and employment dynamics, and how innovation, as proxied by IP instruments, affects the diversification strategies of firms.
He earned his Ph.D. at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, after spending one year as a visiting scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (US), in the United States. He later visited a number of institutions, including EPFL (Switzerland), the University of Cambridge (UK), and the University of Notre Dame (US). He is and has been involved in a number of research projects funded both at national (MIUR) and international levels (EU EC H2020). His works have been published, among other journals, in Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics, Research Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of World Economics, and Small Business Economics. He is an associate editor for Industrial and Corporate Change and the Journal of Industrial and Business Economics. He is also on the editorial review board for Small Business Economics. His works generate impact also outside academia: he consulted international organizations and also acted as a business angel in academic start-ups.