Biography

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Catholic University and member of the CIFREL (Interuniversity Research Centre on Local and Regional Finance) in Milan, Italy

I worked at the TARC (Tax Administration Research Centre) of the University of Exeter, at the ICES (Institutional Change, Economics, Society) research unit during my PhD at IMT, Lucca, and at Brunel University, London, as a Visiting Researcher.

My research is focused on Public Economics and entails topics in Taxation, Tax Compliance and Efficiency Analysis.

In a recent research project (joint with Matthew D. Rablen) I have studied the compliance decision when taxpayers compare their consumption with others in their social network, and also to their own consumption in the recent past. In this setting, engaging in tax evasion is a tool by which taxpayers can improve their relative standing. In this exercise, formal comparative statics for optimal evasion/avoidance is derived and a role for self comparison in explaining persistent post-audit behavioural effects is uncovered. From the policy perspective, results show that there are pronounced revenue returns to the initial acquisition of network information, albeit targeting audits with highly incomplete knowledge of social networks may be counterproductive.

On another strand of research (joint with Christos Kotsogiannis and Konstantinos Serfes), I am studying the optimal registration threshold for value-added tax (VAT). A common feature of VAT systems is to require firms to register above a threshold of activity. However, the discontinuity in tax liabilities generated by the threshold leads to bunching and distorts economic decisions relative to both input bought and output sold. Our research contributes to the current literature by considering an extended-form production chain (B2B2C) that allows to investigate the interaction in registration decision occurring in the business markets as well as to derive theoretical implications on how the optimal threshold might be affected by market structure and policy variables.

I have recently been involved with CIFREL in a policy study for the European Parliament Research Service where I contributed to the investigation of the outcomes of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) focusing on three main research concerns: i) the identification and estimation of the impact of EU ETS on CO₂ emissions; ii) the assessment of the impact of EU ETS on performance at the industry level across member states; and iii) the characterization of the role played so far by the EU ETS as a source of revenues so to shed lights on its potential as a source of funding for possible future expansions of the EU budget.

• mail@dgdi.me
• Milan-Venice, Italy