“In the technological age, universities and companies need to be closer together”. This is one of the concepts expressed by John Elkann on Monday at Bocconi in Milan, on the occasion of the assignment of the “Avvocato Giovanni Agnelli Associate Professorship in Economics” chair to Professor Francesco Decarolis for his studies on industrial organization. The permanent chair was established in 2013 by the Agnelli Foundation (which finances it) to valorise, on a rotational basis, young talents in economic research: it is assigned to an associate professor of Bocconi University, whose scientific interests include applied economics. At the presidency of the Agnelli Foundation is the lawyer's nephew, today at the top of Exor, FCA and Ferrari.
Precisely on FCA, on the sidelines of the event Elkann kept adding a few words on theRenault operation: “I'm happy that, as happened in 2009, exactly ten years ago, for the agreement with Chrysler – said the lawyer's nephew – it is again at Bocconi that we announce this new important operation. I hope that the next 10 years will be as positive as the last ten have been: the experience with FCA has been very encouraging and now the partnership with the French and the Japanese will make us the largest manufacturer in the world. Fiat – added Elkann – was born 120 years ago, as was Renault, and it has many challenges ahead of it, to be faced with courage as it was in 2009. These operations are beneficial, there will be no impact on the Italian plantsindeed, Italy will benefit from it”.
Returning to the initiative with Bocconi, Elkann then recalled that “professors have the task of molding students and training future generations. In Italy the best do not have many incentives to stay and this is a cause for concern”. “Above all – said the president of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Ferrari – Italian students already have great difficulty choosing where to direct their studies. On average, it takes 7 years to graduate and the dropout rate is very high“. The figure is still around 40% today, not counting the difficulty of entering the world of work: “In the future we will need more engineers and more managers, for example – added Elkann -. A degree is an investment that guarantees a return on invested capital of 8%, higher than that of a sovereign bond. The Associate Professorship in Economics named after my grandfather was born from the same logic that inspires the interventions of the Agnelli Foundation in the field of education: to improve the school and university system in Italy, bringing it to the level of the most advanced countries in the world. Decarolis is an extremely brilliant young economist”.
Graduated in Economics from Bocconi in 2002, Francesco Decarolis obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he studied auction markets with Nobel laureate Roger Myerson. Associate professor at Bocconi since 2017, is a member of the Economic Advisory Group Competition Policy of the European Commission – DG Comp. Decarolis' studies have contributed to the debate on the introduction of new market rules both in Italy (in the field of public procurement auctions) and in the United States (government subsidized insurance markets). They are mainly based on three axes: industrial organisation, market design and empirical microeconomics, i.e. the availability of data (including Big Data) on consumers to guide production processes.
“In the last 30 years – said Decarolis – microeconomics has been enriched with new methods for analyze the data and connect them to theoretical models of consumer demand and corporate strategies. This allows us to better understand how markets work and how to design new rules to promote and preserve competition. Thanks to this approach, called "market design", it is sometimes possible to identify the real criticalities of a market and plan innovative surgical interventions, capable of improving social well-being".
“With the funding of the professorship – he added Gian Mario Verona, rector of Bocconi – the Agnelli Foundation, Bocconi's strategic partner, helps the University to attract the best talents in the field of scientific research and contributes to the advancement of applied economics studies on major issues affecting the manufacturing world. It was the formation of industrial groups in the case of Chiara Fumagalli, it is the safeguarding of competition through the planning of well-functioning markets in the case of Decarolis, who joins Bocconi from Boston University".
