Professor Sergio Currarini

I joined the University of Leicester in 2013 as a Professor of Economics. In 1999 I was awarded the European Doctorate in Quantitative Economics (PhD) jointly by the Universitè Catholique de Louvain and the London School of Economics. In then spent a Post-Doctoral research period at the Iowa State University (USA) and subsequently hired as a Lecturer at the Royal Holloway College and then as an associate professor at the University of Venice and at the University of Bristol. I was a Research Associate at the New School of Economics in Moscow in 2016.

I received an Award for Excellence for Teaching (2004 2005) and for Academic Research (2011) from the University of Venice and in 2000 I won the price for the Best Paper of the Year in the “Review of Economic Design”. In 2007 my paper “Homophily Minorities and Segregation” was presented as a Fisher Schultz Lecture at the Econometric Society European Meeting. I am an active member of the scientific community. I have presented my research in the most prestigious Universities including Stanford California Institute of Technology Oxford London School of Economics Northwestern University Universitè Paris 1.

My research activity is centred on the study of social and economic networks.

In particular I have focused on two main issues regarding social networks. First I study how social and economic connections form when agents are heterogeneous along some exogenous or endogenous characteristics. Among the many issues that arise in such context special relevance is found in what sociologists refer to as ""homophily"" that is the tendency to connect to similar others and in the related issues of segregation and polarization of societies. Diversity and inclusion can be studied in such contexts where both the very formation of social connections and social behaviour can be jointly analyzed.

Second I study how information flows along the network of social connections. The issues of strategic information transmission the diffusion of fake news the polarization of opinions and the dynamics of ideological stands can be studied in this context.

I am also interested in public goods and in environmental economics. In particular I have just finished a research paper on the potential of issue linkage to improve the cooperative outcomes in international negotiations.

"Strategic Transmission of Correlated Information" (2020), Economic Journal 130 (October), 2175-2206 (with G. Ursino and S. Chand)

"Peer Effects and Local Congestion in Networks" (2017), Games and Economic Behaviour 105, 40-58 (with E. Fumagalli and F. Panebianco)

"A Simple Model of Homophly in Social Networks" (2016), European Economic Review 90, 18-39 (with J. Matheson and F. Vega-Redondo)

"Identity, Homophily and In-Group Bias" (2016), European Economic Review 90, 40-55 (with F. Mengel)

"Information Sharing Networks in Linear Quadratic Games" (2015), International Journal of Game Theory 44: 701-732 (with F. Feri)

"Homophily and Long Run Integration in Social Networks" (2012) Journal of Economic Theory, 145(5): 1754-1786 (with Y. Bramouille, M.O. Jackson, P. Pin and B. Rogers).

"Identifying the roles of race-based choice and chance in high school friendship network formation" (2010), Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the U.S.A. (PNAS), 107, 4857-4861 (with M.O. Jackson and P. Pin). 

"An Economic Model of Friendship: Homophily, Minorities and Segregation" (2009), , Econometrica 77 (4), 1003-1045 (with M.O. Jackson and P. Pin).

"Group Stability of Hierarchies in Games with Spillovers"(2007), Mathematical Social Science, 54(3), 187-202.

"Network Formation with Sequential Demands" (2000), Review of Economic Design 5(3), 229-249) (with M. Morelli)

I am willing to supervise PhD students who are interested in applications of microeconomics and game theory to social and economic problems. In particular I would prioritise work on:

- social and economic networks

- financial contagion

- information transmission (fake news consensus polarization...)

- diversity integration and inclusion

- pandemics and socio-economic behaviour

- public goods externalities

I am the module leader for EC2045 ""Intermediate Microeconomics"" for which I teach lectures and seminars

I teach a lecture on financial contagion for EC1025 ""Contemporary Issues in Economics""

I teach seminars for MN7406 ""International Business""