Vito Mariella

Post-doc researcher in Economic History and Economics of Innovation at the University of Southern Denmark

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not.

The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale.

Four images of Seoul:

[Oliver Hanney @oliverhanney]

🆕 The development economics I’d like to see

I recently attended the Growth Summit in Morocco. It was the best conference I’ve ever attended.

My main takeaway was that development economics is missing a whole ecosystem of organisations working on growth: https://t.co/6294bMAbXZ

[Oliver Kim @oliverwkim]

Know this turn has been in the making for a while but this is a bit like if the Pope announced he was becoming a Buddhist

[HEDG (Historical Economics and Development Group) @SDUeconhist]

📢Call for papers

The 12th Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for Economic and Social History will commence under the theme of “Demography, Education, and Social Change in Economic History”

📅September 24th, 2026

📍University of Southern Denmark, Odense

Read more below!

[Julius Koschnick @JuliusKoschnick]

New paper alert 🚨 🚨
Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England
Together with co-authors @SdePleijt and @phwallis, we set out to solve one of the most intriguing puzzles of the Industrial Revolution

[HEDG (Historical Economics and Development Group) @SDUeconhist]

🚨 The Department of Economics and Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at SDU are happy to announce our PhD summer school in Economic History 🚨

10-21 August 2026 (2 week)
17-21 August 2026 (1 week)

Theme: ”Populism, Uncertainty, and the Globalized Economy”

[Julius Koschnick @JuliusKoschnick]

New working paper 🚨🚨🚨

What was the origin of modern economic growth?

Joel Mokyr had a Nobel winning answer - growth took off when science and technology began to reinforce each other

But can we test this quantitatively?

This paper does so – read more ⬇️ 🧵

[Costanza Giannantoni @__costanza]

New 🧵: Femicides remain a critical systemic failure, even in countries where general homicide rates are decreasing.

How can we better target policy interventions? And how can we optimize the deployment of Anti-Violence Centers (AVCs) to maximize their impact?

In our new paper in European Economic Review, we use ML & Causal Inference to find out. #EconTwitter🧵👇

w/ @augusto_cerqua, @marco_lett, @gabrieleaopinto, data available on companion website: https://t.co/RxyXDM9NW4

[Costanza Giannantoni @__costanza]

Finally sharing my JMP, about the efficiency and distributional effects of administrative decentralization.

The question: Does admin dec improve public spending efficiency everywhere, or does it widen the gap between institutionally strong and weak municipalities? Which are the fiscal and political mechanisms behind?

Joint w/ @augusto_cerqua

Full paper: https://t.co/S02DQNQYlQ

JMP Thread (1/12) #EconTwitter #EconJobMarket

[Giampaolo Lecce @giamp85]

Our new working paper !

[Giampaolo Lecce @giamp85]

🚨 New Working Paper: “Building Consistent Territorial Units over Time: A Graph-Based Method for Historical Municipal Boundaries in Italy” 🇮🇹
Can shifting boundaries distort how we read history? 👇
https://t.co/ZSrWOVpBcM

[Ahmad Lashkaripour @ALashkaripour]

We’ve written a review on *New Industrial Policy* for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.

We offer a unified framework for analyzing IP effects and survey evidence from both ex post event studies and ex ante model-based evaluations of IP.

🧵thread on key takeaways (link below)

[Vito Mariella @MariellVito]

@TBourany Great initiative! Is there the possibility to attend the presentations online?

[Nicholas Decker @captgouda24]

Does industrial policy work? I cover the theory and evidence behind it. My takeaway? The theory is sound, but the evidence is lacking — so lacking that I think it is wildly inappropriate to cite many of these papers. However, what we do have is enough — industrial policy works.

[Silvia ⚪⚫ @lastregabianca]

Il ricordo più bello che ho di #PippoBaudo #5maggio2002

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

I'm happy to share an open letter to the Israeli government from 23 professors of economics across the US and Europe (including myself):
https://t.co/miz2X7yNWF

[Vito Mariella @MariellVito]

Grossman: 'È genocidio quello che sta succedendo a Gaza' - la Repubblica https://t.co/I9LMPSUeUL

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

"BBC staff: we're forced to do pro-Israel PR
A devastating letter signed by over 100 BBC journalists underlines one of the great scandals of our age"
https://t.co/CsRBy6I2zy

[Giampaolo Lecce @giamp85]

🧵New WP: “From Fields to Factories: Malaria Eradication and Structural Transformation in Post-War Italy” Can eliminating a disease change the structure of an economy? https://t.co/sOiTeDQlmu

👇

[Vito Mariella @MariellVito]

OSCAR 2025 | 'No Other Land', about Gaza occupation https://t.co/adJXWTQlAr