Born in 1874, Luigi Einaudi was one of the most influential European economists of his time and President of the Italian Republic from 1948 to 1955. His main field of interest was public finance, but rather than pure theory, he cultivated history. He believed that in history one could trace the origin of most of the imbalances marring the social system of his time – poverty and ignorance in the first place. It was the society’s responsibility to afford to all a fair chance to better one’s position and to fully develop his or her personality. Capitalism as it had developed over the centuries bore in itself the vast inequalities inherited from past ages and maintained strongholds of power (the big corporation, privileged social groups) which were to be checked with appropriate laws and policies.
While in the political arena Einaudi gained the fame of being a conservative, his teachings have been the springboard for many radical thinkers, such as Piero Gobetti and Ernesto Rossi. He corresponded with the group of German thinkers who proposed the social market economy.
The final sentence in his Lectures of Social Policy runs as follows: “The market cannot act by itself. It can give even more powerful results if we will be able to improve and reform the institutions, customs and laws where it breeds”.
Alfredo Gigliobianco was born in Cremona, Italy, in 1955, Alfredo Gigliobianco earned his degree in Economics at the University of Modena in 1978 and studied economics and political science at MIT in 1980. After being economist at the United Nations between 1983 and 1985, he joined the Bank of Italy as economic historian. Since 2007 he has been Head of the Economic and Financial History Division of the Bank.
He taught at LUISS (Rome) and at the Venice International Summer School on Finance, Institutions and History.
His main areas of interest are the Evolution of financial systems, State intervention in the economy, History of economic thought.
In 2010 he edited Luigi Einaudi: libertà economica e coesione sociale, published by Laterza, focusing on Einaudi’s social thought.
Among his other publications: Via Nazionale, Donzelli, Rome, 2006 (a prosopography of the top management of the Banca d’Italia); “Does Economic Theory Matter in Shaping Banking Regulation? A Case-study of Italy (1861-1936)” (with Claire Giordano), Accounting, Economics and Law, 2012, v. 2, 1, art. 5; “Resource Allocation by the Banking System” (with S. Battilossi and G. Marinelli), in G. Toniolo (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, Oxford U. P., 2013.
In 2007 he wrote four dialogues whose main character is Donato Menichella, Governor of the Bank of Italy in post-war Italy. They have been staged several times, including in New York City, and are published in F. Barca, L. D’Antone, R. Quaglia (eds.), Storie interrotte. Il Sud che ha fatto l’Italia, Laterza.
Charles S. Maier, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, was born in New York City on February 23, 1939. He received his A.B. degree (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. from Harvard. Besides Harvard he has taught at the University of Bielefeld (1976), and Duke University (1976-80), and the LUISS-Guido Carli (2014). He has been a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin (2003), a Directeur de recherche at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2008), and a Distinguished Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington DC (2011). He has held Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles including Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975,1988); The Unmasterable Past (1986); In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (1987; Dissolution: The Collapse of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997); Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (2005); and Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (2014). Several of these have been translated into Italian. He delivered the Lezione del Mulino in 1999 and the Salvemini Memorial Lecture on Italy’s Great War, this past October. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a recipient of the German Grosse Bundesverdienstkreuz and the Austrian Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst.
Luigi Zingales is Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Chicago School of Business. Luigi Zingales’ research interests span from corporate governance to financial development, from political economy to the economic effects of culture. Currently, he has been involved in developing the best interventions to cope with the aftermath of the financial crisis. He also co-developed the Financial Trust Index, which is designed to monitor the level of trust that Americans have toward their financial system. In addition to holding his position at Chicago Booth, Zingales is currently a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow for the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a fellow of the European Governance Institute. He is also the president of the American Finance Association and an editorialist for Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times. Zingales also serves on the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which has been examining the legislative, regulatory, and legal issues affecting how public companies function.
His research has earned him the 2003 Bernácer Prize for the best young European financial economist, the 2002 Nasdaq award for best paper in capital formation, and a National Science Foundation Grant in economics. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance and the American Economic Review.
His book, Saving Capitalism from Capitalists, coauthored with Raghuram G. Rajan, has been acclaimed as “one of the most powerful defenses of the free market ever written” by Bruce Bartlett of National Review Online. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times called it “an important book.” His latest book is A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (Basic Books, 2012).