Luigi Pistaferri


Luigi Pistaferri is an Italian-American economist and the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is known for his research in labor and macroeconomics, focusing on family consumption, labor supply, welfare reform, and inequality. He is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Institute for the Study of Labor, and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center on Longevity. He is the co-director or GRID. During the period 2012-17 he served as a co-editor of the American Economic Review; he is currently one of the co-editors of the Journal of Political Economy. He is the author of the book The Economics of Consumption: Theory and Evidence.
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Biography

Pistaferri was born in Naples, Italy, in 1968. He earned his undergraduate degree in International Trade and Foreign Exchange Markets from the Istituto Universitario Navale in 1993. He then completed a Master's in Economics at Bocconi University in Milan in 1995. Pistaferri went on to earn his Ph.D. in economics from University College London in 1999 and later obtained a Doctorate in Economic Sciences from IUN in 2001.

Academic career

Pistaferri joined Stanford University in 1999 as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. He was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and to full professor in 2011. Since 2013, he has held the position of Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Pistaferri has also held several visiting academic positions, including a Bajola Parisani Visiting Chair in Economics and Institutions at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance in Rome during 2011-2012, a "Franco Modigliani" Visiting Professorship at the University of Naples "Federico II" in 2018-19, and a University of Chicago Griffin Economics Incubator Distinguished Visitor position in 2024-25.
Before joining Stanford, Pistaferri worked as a research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London from 1998 to 1999.
Pistaferri is one of the co-authors of a paper that found a significant relationship between income inequality and consumption inequality over the past two decades. His work often incorporates large-scale datasets and quantitative methods to analyze families' and individuals' behavior in response to economic policy changes.

Awards

Selected publications

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