Luigi Pistaferri

Luigi Pistaferri (born 1968) 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 (NBER), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center on Longevity. He is the co-director or GRID (Global Repository of Income Dynamics). 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 (with frequent collaborator Tullio Jappelli) of the book The Economics of Consumption: Theory and Evidence.

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 (IUN, now Parthenope University) 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. 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. His work often incorporates large-scale datasets and quantitative methods to analyze families' and individuals' behavior in response to economic policy changes.

Awards

Elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists (2024) Excellence in Refereeing Award from American Economic Review (2012) Annual Economics Outstanding Teaching Prize from Stanford University (2005) Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Hoover Institution (2003) Co-winner of the Best Italian Young Economist Prize, awarded by Il Sole-24 Ore (1999) Review of Economic Studies Tour participant (1999)

Selected publications