#neocafoscarini: Serena Trucchi from the job market to San Giobbe

Job market season is about to start for young economists around the world. Worldwide research opportunities and talents from the best universities meet in the dedicated platforms and in meetings organized in several cities.

Ca’ Foscari is one of the few participating Italian universities: for the second year in a row our university will attend the job market organized by the Royal Economic Society. In London professors at Ca’ Foscari will interview potential candidates from universities around the world for four open positions of fixed term lecturers (by December 10th 2017).

In 2017, from hundreds of applications from all over the world, the Department of Economics selected Serena Trucchi, who spent two years at the same department at UCL as a Marie Curie fellow after a becoming a PhD in Turin and doing a postdoc in Bologna. The young economist will become part of the Ca’ Foscari team on the European research project SHARE from November. She will also teach Macroeconomics to Master’s students and PhD candidates.

Why Ca’ Foscari?

“After several interviews around Europe, I took part to the job market in London and in France. I chose Ca’ Foscari because the department is a great place to work, stimulating and dynamic. Many colleagues are interested in themes I have been working on such as the labour market, the consumer’s expectations, financial alphabetization. I think that it is a dream place for an economist. And there is Venice, a beautiful city to live I really enjoy”.

Your Marie Curie project is revealing its first results...

“I studied the role of expectations in consumption choices of families during the crisis. The analysis was carried out on Dutch data but is representative of dynamic that concerned other European countries including Italy when two drops in consumption were recorded (in 2008-2009 and 2011-2012). We see how in the second period shrinking incomes were perceived as less temporary, as a longer term perspective. Uncertainty increases. It affected greatly consumption: family perceive themselves as poorer”.

Have you studied the relationship between wealth and consumption during the crisis: what was the outcome?

“The crisis led to a 60% drop of stock price in Italy. We studied how this shock which was unexpected for savers and how it led to a drop in consumption. This impact was significant. For each euro that was lost in risky finance wealth we see a loss of 8-9 cents for consumption”.

Another of your fields of interest is financial alphabetization...

“We evaluated the role of information policies carried out by banks to promote such an alphabetization. When the institutions commit to inform consumers we can see a positive impact, especially for weak portions of the population such as the elderly”.