Giorgia Romagnoli
https://8c42967b65e8f58bb549e173d8af5cc8611b7ce0www.googledrive.com/host/0B46cwO_JTPwxMnFneExuX3V3UWc/index.html
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Address
Phone
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
347-421-3438 (mobile)
212-998-8274 (office)
Placement Director: Alberto Bisin
Graduate Administrator: Marjorie Lesser
alberto.bisin@nyu.edu
marjorie.lesser@nyu.edu
212-998-8916
212-998-8923
Education
PhD. In Economics, New York University, 2009-2015 (expected)
Thesis Title: Essays in Development and Behavioral Economics
M.A. in Economics (with Honors), Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy 2007-2009
B.S. in Economics, University of Turin, Italy 2003-2006
References
Professor Debraj Ray
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
212-998-8906 (office)
debraj.ray@nyu.edu
Professor Andrew Schotter
19 West Fourth St., 5th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
212-998-8952 (office)
andrew.schotter@nyu.edu
Professor Guillaume Frechette
19 West Fourth St., 5th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
212.992.8683 (office)
guillaume.frechette@nyu.edu
Teaching and Research Fields
Primary fields: Development Economics and Behavioral Economics
Secondary fields: Experimental Economics and Microeconomic Theory
Teaching Experience
Spring, 2015
Summer, 2013
Summer, 2012
Spring, 2011
Research Experience
Topics in Econometrics, NYU, Teaching Assistant
Intermediate Microeconomics, NYU, Adjunct Instructor
Money and Banking, NYU, Adjunct Instructor
Statistics, NYU, Teaching Assistant for Professor Kevin Thom
2011-2013
2008-2009
CTED New York University, Research Assistant
University of Turin, Research Assistant (Econometrics)
Professional Activities
Conferences and seminars: NYU-CESS Experimental Political Science 2014, TADC London 2014,
Games and Decisions Pisa 2014, NYU Development Seminar, ESA Florida 2014, NEUDC Boston 2014,
EconCon Philadelphia 2015, NYU CESS Seminar 2015, ESA Dallas 2015, NYU Development Seminar
2015.
Referee: Journal of Development Economics.
Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships
2009-2014
2007-2009
2009
2006
MacCracken Fellowship, New York University
Allievi Program Fellowship, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy
Premio Optime MA, Unione Industriale, Turin
Premio Optime BS, Unione Industriale, Turin
Research Papers
Information Aggregation in Markets with Storage (Job Market Paper 1)
Producers of storable commodities face an important choice: Sell immediately after production or store
and sell at a later date. In the absence of signals provided by futures markets, the level of aggregate
storage has predictive power for future prices – ceteris paribus higher storage is associated to lower
expected prices. However aggregate storage is typically not directly observed and the question asked in
the paper is whether sellers are able to infer storage from other market variables. I answer this question
with a theoretical analysis and an empirical investigation conducted at the Ethiopia Commodity
Exchange (ECX). The theory shows that when there are aggregate unobserved shocks to demand and
supply and sellers are risk averse, the current price is not a sufficient statistics for aggregate storage and
individual storage strategies are generally suboptimal conditional on the aggregate storage level. I also
show that disseminating information about aggregate volumes traded can lead to storage revelation and
discuss the role of centralized commodity markets in light of this finding. I use the model to derive two
tests for storage revelation and run them on a unique dataset of coffee transactions at ECX. The results
of both tests show that sellers at ECX do not know the aggregate level of storage when deciding the
timing of their sales. Finally a numerical exercise shows that the total welfare is not unambiguously
improved when storage is revealed and the model is used to shed light on this result.
The Effect of Ambiguity on Status Quo Bias – An Experimental Study (Job Market Paper 2) (with Amnon
Maltz)
We conduct an experiment to determine the effect of ambiguity on status quo bias. We find no evidence
of the bias in the absence of ambiguity and when ambiguity is present both in the status quo option and
the alternative. We do find evidence for status quo bias under asymmetric presence of ambiguity, i.e.
when the status quo option is non-ambiguous and the alternative is, or when the status quo option is
ambiguous and the alternative is not. These findings are not predicted by the existing models of choice
with initial endowment, such as the loss aversion model by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the
incomplete preferences model by Bewley (1986). Our results, combined with the evidence from the
endowment effect literature, suggest that dissimilarity between options may be an important determinant
of the status quo bias.
Price Information, Inter-village Networks and ‘Bargaining Spillovers’: Experimental evidence from
Ghana (with Nicole Hildebrandt, Yaw Nyarko and Emilia Soldani)
We conducted a randomized field experiment to determine the impact of providing commodity price
information to rural farmers. Our initial results seemed to show a positive effect in the first year which
died out in the second year. However, a deeper analysis that takes into account the general equilibrium
effects of bargaining behavior by traders, revealed that this initial presumption was false. Through a
novel index of inter-village communication networks in the study area, we are able to disentangle this
bargaining spillover effect, and rule out indirect effects arising from information sharing between
treatment and control group farmers. We show that the final unbiased average effect of the price
information treatment is an 11% increase in revenues. This is equivalent to an average increase in profits
greater than 22% for those for whom profits are less than half of revenues. The effects we observe
empirically are consistent with the predictions of the model we use---a Myerson (1984)-style incomplete
information bargaining model between farmers and better-informed traders.
Research In Progress
A Tale of two Utilities (with Veronica Cappelli and Fabio Maccheroni)
A large body of empirical evidence shows violations of expected utility. To accommodate these
violations, decision theory and behavioral economics have provided a variety of non-expected utility
theories. However, the existing evidence does not clearly discriminate among such theories. Many of the
most well-known non-expected utility models are subsumed by the class of biseparable preferences,
which includes Rank Dependent Utility models (Choquet Expected Utility, Prospect Theory and ChoiceAcclimating Personal Equilibria), models of Disappointment Aversion, Maxmin Expected Utility and its
Alpha-maxmin extension. Biseparable preferences satisfy the minimal behavioral restrictions that allow
to separate tastes (captured by a utility function on outcomes) and beliefs (captured by the willingness to
bet on events, often a distorted probability). In this paper we derive a non-parametric test for all models
in the biseparable class. We apply this test to the results of a preliminary lab experiment. In the data we
find little support for the separation of utility and beliefs that biseparability of preferences characterizes.
On the other hand, the observed behavior can be accommodated by alternative models, such as Smooth
Ambiguity and Source Dependent Expected Utility.
Paying for Inattention (with Ala Avoyan)