Orazio is an International Research Fellow, working with colleagues at IFS on human capital in developing countries.
Orazio is a Professor at Yale, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research. In 2001 he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and in 2004 Fellow of the British Academy. He was President of the European Economic Association in 2014, and is a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society.
After obtaining his PhD at the London School of Economics, Orazio taught at Stanford University and the University of Bologna. He was also a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He has been Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association and Quantitative Economics.
His current research interests focus principally on development economics, household consumption and saving behaviour, risk sharing and inequality.
Education
PhD Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1988
MSc Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1984
Laurea (Summa Cum Laude) Statistical and Economic Sciences, Universita’ di Bologna, 1982
In this article we argue that the life-cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump-shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household-level data sources.
In this paper we argue that only when one uses data and arguments relating to the life-time experiences of individuals or households within an economy can one understand recent trends and patterns in saving rates.
The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component.
This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.
We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare.
In this paper the authors show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in U.S. household-level data.
We use two-and three-period overlapping-generations (OLG) models to show that entries and exits (births and deaths) produce a relationship between aggregate consumption growth and the interest rate that is fundamentally different from the individual Euler equation for consumption.
We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.
Two competing explanations of the UK consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalisation-imperfect housing market hypothesis of Muellbauer and Murphy and the expectations hypothesis of King. The authors use 15 years of Family Expenditure Surveys, and cohort analysis, to investigate to what extent these two hypotheses agree with observed changes in consumption patterns.
