New endowed professorship in Quantitative Economic History
Economist Mattia Fochesato researches the factors that influence income and asset distribution in the long term. The President’s Board of the University of Basel has appointed him as the Faculty of Business and Economics’s new Assistant Professor in Quantitative Economic History/Cliometrics. The five-year professorship is financed by the Max Geldner Foundation.
20 April 2018
Prof. Mattia Fochesato currently works as a postdoctoral associate in a research group led by economic historian Robert C. Allen at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi. He will take up the Max Geldner Assistant Professorship in Quantitative Economic History/Cliometrics in the fall semester of 2018.
The Basel-based Max Geldner Foundation is providing CHF 825,000 in funding for the five-year assistant professorship, strengthening the field of economic history within the Faculty of Business and Economics. The foundation’s professorship allows the faculty to improve the staff-student ratio and promote early career researchers.
Focus on asset distribution
Fochesato studied economics at the University of Siena, obtaining his doctorate there in 2013. In 2012, he moved to Stanford University as a visiting scholar on an Earhart Foundation Fellowship, and spent 2014 and 2015 at the Institut d’études politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. He has also been a regular visiting scholar at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Fochesato’s areas of focus include classical economic history with concentrations in the early modern period and the differences between northern and southern Europe. He is also researching the factors that influence income and asset distribution in the long term.
Further information
Prof. Aleksander Berentsen, University of Basel, Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics, tel. +41 61 207 12 05, email: aleksander.berentsen@unibas.ch
