Marco Rosso

Welcome to my personal website—glad you made it here of your own free will (or maybe you clicked by mistake; it happens to the best of us).

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Bologna, and I will defend my thesis, “Essays in Political Economy and Crime Economics”, on January 28, 2026.

My research orbits around Political Economy, Crime Economics, Experimental and Behavioral Economics—perfect for anyone who enjoys awkward questions, ethical dilemmas, and datasets that refuse to be found.

I pair this with clean, testable theoretical frameworks (incentives, information frictions, selection) to pin down mechanisms before chasing their empirical footprints. On the tools side, I live in Python (pandas, BeautifulSoup, spaCy, geopandas), Stata (reghdfe/hdfe, frames, rdrobust, event-study workflows, esttab), and QGIS or R, depending on how I woke up that day. This often means building end-to-end pipelines—from web-scraping and NLP to geocoding and panel construction.

At the moment, I am navigating the thrilling limbo of academia: working through the reviews of my PhD thesis while exploring new research ideas and job opportunities.

Meanwhile—when I am not trying to engineer a Pareto-superior outcome for my to-do list to avoid the deadweight loss of downtime—I am working on the rollout of the MinUTo App¹ in support of mindful parenting, in continuity with the online interviews I conducted for the MinUTo Project.

Moreover, I also serve as Teaching Assistant for Industrial Economics, Econometrics, Political Economy, and Python for Economists. Mostly, I translate complex ideas and code into unlikely metaphors—with a confidence that is only partly justified.

And finally, to give meaning to this whole circus: I organize the DSE Afterwork Drinks, a monthly event where we talk about academia, life, broken dreams, and calls for proposals about to expire—though with a drink in hand, which changes everything.

My favorite quote?
“There is no point in using the word “impossible” to describe something that has clearly happened.” ²
Funny how obvious it seems once you notice it, right?