Enrico Spolaore

Enrico Spolaore is a Professor of Economics at Tufts University, where he served as Chair of the Department of Economics from 2006 to 2012. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a CESIfo Fellow at the University of Munich, and an External Associate at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). He was a Co-editor of Economics and Politics for five years, and has served as a Consultant for the European Commission and other institutions. A native of Italy, Spolaore holds economics degrees from the University of Rome and the University of Siena, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Spolaore’s main research interests are in political economy, economic growth and development, and international economics. His work has covered a variety of topics: the determination of the size of countries, the political economy of fiscal policy and adjustments, the evaluation of social mobility, the determinants of international conflict, the political economy of European integration, the deep roots of economic development, the barriers to the spread of technological and institutional innovations, the decline of fertility, and the relation between ancestry and culture. His publications include numerous articles in academic journals (American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, etc.) and book chapters, as well as the monograph The Size of Nations (with Alberto Alesina, MIT Press, 2003 – paperback edition 2005), and the two-volume edited collection Culture and Economic Growth (Edward Elgar, 2014).