DEM Seminar Series

The DEM Seminar Series is the Department of Economics and Management’s flagship research seminar programme. It hosts leading scholars in the international arena, whose work aligns with the main research areas of the department’s groups. 

Seminars are typically held in a brown-bag format, lasting about one hour, and are structured to encourage open scientific exchange. Presenters share ongoing research, preliminary findings, or recently completed work, followed by an interactive discussion with faculty members, post-doctoral researchers, and PhD students. 

By regularly engaging with high-quality external speakers, the DEM Seminar Series plays a central role in supporting the department’s commitment to research excellence, strengthening international networks, and exposing the academic community to frontier developments in the discipline.

Due to room capacity constraints, attendance is generally limited to DEM members. However, participants from outside DEM may attend subject to availability. If you are not on the DEM Seminar Series mailing list and wish to participate, please email seminari.dem@unitn.it. A confirmation regarding availability will be sent in due course.  

Companies are increasingly scrutinized for their environmental behavior, and many struggle to develop strategies that build environmental legitimacy. We examine these challenges when environmental legitimacy is questioned, after an industry is exposed to an environmental scandal. Our focus is on how firms adapt their trademark strategies in response to a scandal. Trademarks are particularly relevant because they serve two functions: protecting and building reputation, as well as signaling new product development activities. In terms of environmental legitimacy, clean trademarks—i.e., trademarks related to products embedding clean technologies—are a logical choice to signal commitment to the environment. However, it is unclear to what extent companies might resort to clean trademarks in response to an environmental scandal. We develop hypotheses on the expected clean trademark strategies by building on complementary theories. We test our hypotheses using the Dieselgate scandal and the United States car market as an empirical test bed. We found that firms exposed to Dieselgate filed more clean trademarks, which we interpreted as a strategy to reassure the market. However, firms that had already developed clean technologies filed fewer clean trademarks, which could be seen as a way to distance themselves from the rest of the industry.

  • Speaker: Caterina Castaldi, Utrecht University

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

This paper shows that regions with more secure land rights are associated with smaller heat damage to crop yields. After documenting this pattern across countries, we identify this relationship causally using the staggered land registry reform that enhanced land tenure security in Greece. Consistent with our theory, we find that the reform attenuates heat damage because it shifts farmers' adaptation strategies from enlarging croplands to increasing agricultural inputs (capital, labor, and irrigation). Overall, the reform is projected to offset at least two-thirds of Greece's agricultural productivity losses by 2100, underlining the crucial role of institutions in facilitating climate change adaptation.

The paper is co-authored with Liang Diao (Osaka University) &  Huiqian Song (Kyoto University)

  • Speaker: François Bereille, INRAE (Research for agriculture, food, environment) 

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

This paper investigates the financing choice between Business Angels (BAs) and Venture Capitalists (VCs). We propose a theoretical framework where the decision is governed by financing urgency, defined as the risk of project failure while waiting for capital. Entrepreneurs must trade off the immediate liquidity provided by BAs against the superior efficiency and scaling capabilities of VCs. We test our predictions using a proprietary dataset of Italian ventures, exploiting institutional solvency constraints to identify binding survival risks. We find that liquidity crises and legal insolvency sharply increase the likelihood of BA financing. This effect persists even when controlling for deal size and firm quality, supporting a selection mechanism over an efficiency gap explanation. Our findings suggest that Business Angels provide strategic insurance, offering immediate liquidity to mitigate survival risk and preserve the option value of high-potential ventures.

  • Speaker: Samuele Guido Sozzani, Politecnico di Milano

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

The seminar provides an introduction to Genoeconomics, an emerging field that integrates genetic data into economic analysis to better understand individual heterogeneity and the origins of inequality. It discusses why this approach is increasingly relevant for the social sciences and highlights the core questions it seeks to answer, including the extent to which genetic data are informative about individual traits, how environmental factors moderate genetic effects, and how genetic predispositions interact with institutions and policies to shape socioeconomic outcomes.
The empirical analysis presented in the seminar illustrates how these questions can be addressed in practice by focusing on the returns to education.
Returns to education have long been a central focus of social science research due to their implications for productivity, social mobility, and inequality. A persistent challenge in this literature is the inability to fully account for heterogeneity in skills and initial endowments, which may confound estimates of causal returns. This paper addresses this limitation by incorporating genetic information---specifically, the Educational Attainment Polygenic Index (EA PGI)---to study the role of genetic predisposition in shaping the returns to education. We exploit the mid-20th-century expansion of university access in the United Kingdom and use the measured reduction in distance to the nearest university as an instrument for college attainment. Preliminary findings point to two main results: (1) the EA PGI is positively associated with wages; and (2) this association is stronger among individuals without a college degree, suggesting a negative gene-environment interaction. That is, higher education appears to reduce the influence of genetic predisposition on earnings, consistent with the interpretation that it mitigates genetic inequality. We then deconstruct these findings by building on the Marginal Treatment Effects (MTE) framework. We propose a decomposition of treatment effect heterogeneity that distinguishes between gene-environment interaction (GxE)---differences in returns across genotypes---and gene-environment correlation (rGE)---the influence of genetic predisposition on selection into treatment. This approach enables us to isolate the distinct pathways through which genetic factors shape the observed returns to education.

 

  • Speaker: Pietro Biroli, University of Bologna

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

Digital transformation in small and medium-sized enterprises does not begin with technology. It begins with the psychological readiness of the entrepreneur and without such a strong and positive cognitive stance toward innovation, no technological process can take root. In SMEs, where decision-making is highly centralized and strongly personalized, the entrepreneur’s perceptions, beliefs, and motivations are the true enabling conditions for any form of technological change. Technology inevitably brings complexity, uncertainty, and the need for organizational adaptation. Faced with this, entrepreneurs filter information through cognitive frames that shape how they interpret risks, opportunities, and potential benefits. This subjective interpretations determine whether SMEs open up to new technologies or resist them. When feelings of trust, usefulness, and perceived control prevail, technology becomes actionable and integrable. Inevitably, when fear, skepticism, or cognitive overload dominate, innovation stalls before it even begins.
The seminar will deepen this perspective by showing how several scientific contributions had a specific facet of this sensemaking process, clarifying why psychological interpretation, and not only technological capacity, ultimately shapes the trajectory of digital transformation in SMEs.

 

  • Speaker: Massimiliano Pellegrini, Tor Vergata Università degli Studi di Roma

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

The applicable voting rule determines how closely collective decisions between three or more options reflect the preferences of a given individual. We construct measures of this and ask if a specific decision maker is more successful using.

 

  • Speaker: Stefan Napel, University of Bayreuth

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

Residents are key yet often marginalized stakeholders in tourism. When tourism is perceived as exploitative, support declines, threatening sustainability. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines factors shaping residents’ support in destinations with weak governance and explores the relationship between governance structures and residents’ attitudes toward tourism.

 

  • Speaker: Linda Osti, Bangor University

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

This paper examines the unintended consequences of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) that was adopted in 2015. While BEPS was designed to curb profit shifting by large multinational enterprises (MNEs), we hypothesize that it may have facilitated the adoption of corporate tax avoidance (CTA) practices by smaller MNEs. We test this research hypothesis on a panel dataset of French MNEs covering the 2012–2021 period. Our main findings are as follows: First, we show that firms with a turnover below the threshold of 750 million euros, a critical size threshold in the BEPS regulatory framework, have increased their likelihood to be settled in a tax heaven post-BEPS. Second, we show that this effect is stronger for small MNEs which do not exhibit financial shareholders and/or consolidated accounts. We interpret this result as indirect evidence that the new BEPS guidelines has reduced firm dispersion in their idiosyncratic ability to avoid corporate taxes.

 

  • Speaker: Flora Bellone, Université Côte d'Azur 

Location: room 1F (first floor - DEM)

Many countries provide public policy support for R&D networks. In publicly funded R&D consortia, firms collaborate with each other and with public scientific institutions to carry out joint innovation projects. The idea behind these policy schemes is that collaborative innovation enables firms to benefit from knowledge spillovers within R&D networks. Surprisingly, however, there is no empirical research showing that spillover effects actually exist in publicly funded R&D consortia. This paper seeks to investigate the extent and sources of knowledge spillovers in R&D networks and to distinguish them from other drivers of additionality generated by collaborative innovation policy programs. Our empirical analysis refers to the case of Norway, where different policy programs have supported R&D in the last two decades. We consider the entire population of Norwegian firms supported under these policy programs, i.e. more than 15000 collaborative projects between 2002 and 2021. Based on the information on each project, we construct networks of innovators and new R&D spillover pool variables. We use a spatial autoregressive econometric approach and estimate a network regression estimator that endogenizes peer effects related to knowledge
spillovers. The econometric results show that the knowledge spillovers arising from publicly funded R&D networks are positive but small, and that they have become weaker over time. We also find that the spillover effects resulting from R&D subsidy programs are much stronger than those of tax incentives, and that the spillover effects are much stronger for collaborations between firms operating in the same industry.

 

  • Speaker: Fulvio Castellacci, University of Oslo

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)