My work

I grew up in a farm of Northwestern rural Italy. Part of my family migrated from Sicily in the 1960s to find jobs in the industrial heartland of Turin. Since then, my region has experienced significant deindustrialization and relative decline. My village once had shops, cafes, a garage, a school and a social club; now, most of these amenities are gone, and many houses are empty or for sale. These early life experiences have shaped my research agenda, which bridges geography, political science, applied microeconomics and behavioural studies, focusing on three main areas:

(1) Place and individual behaviour. I explore how spatial inequality drives political discontent and protests, and analyse the long-term consequences of place in shaping individual behaviour and outcomes (social, economic, cultural and political). I am particularly interested in spatial identity politics. I aim to understand why there is growing spatial polarisation on views towards migration, gender rights, and climate policies, all issues that are increasingly relevant in politics. To this end, my work aims to disentangle contextual from composition effects.

(2) Spatial inequality. I’m interested in studying how the third and fourth industrial revolutions are driving regional and urban-rural spatial disparities and divergence. I often look at spatial inequality through a political economy angle, exploring how government actions shape patterns of regional divergence.

(3) Policy evaluation. When not working on points one and two, I also occasionally analyse place-based and other locally-targeted public policies.

I believe that description and explanation are both essential goals of social sciences. Therefore, some of my papers use counterfactual methods to identify causal relationships, while others build comparative descriptive inferences.

I also advocate for methodological pluralism and the idea that while qualitative and quantitative methods follow different styles and techniques, they are driven by a similar underlying logic of inference. For example, my work combines quasi-experimental analysis on large-scale surveys and administrative datasets, randomised experiments and in-depth qualitative research.