Antonella Rancan is associate professor of economics at the University of Molise in Italy. She came to CHOPE to continue her research on Franco Modigliani’s macroeconomics by working on his archival materials, and the archival materials of other economists to reconstruct the connections among them and their ideas. At the Center, Antonella is working on a monograph on Modigliani’s contributions to postwar macroeconomics: “My research focuses on Modigliani’s collaboration with the Federal Reserve for the building of the so called FED-MIT-Penn macroeconometric model. In particular, the model’s purposes and its use in the policy debate, especially on the basis of unpublished material for an understanding of the dynamics behind the building of the model.”
Antonella has enjoyed the Center’s weekly lunch seminars and its Hayek Lecture Series as opportunities for “sharing research interests with other historians of economic thought” and to engage with “different topics, historical perspectives, and methodological approaches. This multiplicity of narratives has stimulated my own research and provided a window for a better understanding of the directions of our discipline.”