Biography

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics of New York University.
I hold an M.Sc. in Economics from University College London (2003) and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Rome La Sapienza (2001).
My research interests are in Financial Economics, Corporate Finance and Macroeconomics. I am currently working on my dissertation, composed of two projects.
In the first, entitled “A General Equilibrium Model of Collateralized Loan Obligations’’, I investigate the welfare implications of the introduction of these securitization vehicles into a model with production, incomplete markets, moral hazard by entrepreneurs and different classes of outside investors (banks among them). Under the assumption that banks have the ability to curb entrepreneurial moral hazard and more flexibility than firms in designing different securities, I find that CLOs, with their tranched structures, tend to be Pareto improving and do not necessarily imply a reduction of the amount of monitoring in the economy.
In the second project (joint with Alberto Bisin and Piero Gottardi), titled “Equilibrium Corporate Finance and Macroeconomics’’, we study a general equilibrium economy with incomplete markets, production and non-trivial corporate financing decisions, where the non-triviality stems from the coexistence of borrowing constraints on the part of the agents, incomplete financial markets and asymmetric information between corporate investors and managers or between bondholders and shareholders. In this framework, the Modigliani-Miller proposition does not hold and production and financing decisions of firms cannot be separated.
In my year at the EUI, I would like to extend the framework developed in the second project to an infinite horizon setting and study, with a quantitative perspective, the macroeconomic implications of the coexistence of market incompleteness and corporate finance frictions.