I.S.E.O. Institute

Brief history and profile

I.S.E.O. Institute (Institute for Studies on Economics and Occupation) is a non-profit association based in Iseo (Northern Italy) and founded in 1998 by Nobel Laureate in Economics Franco Modigliani. Upon Franco’s death, Prof. Robert Solow (Nobel laureate in Economics 1987) accepted with great enthusiasm to chair the Institute Modigliani founded and therefore to carry on his work.

The main goal of the association is that of promoting the analysis and the discussion about the world economy, focusing the interest on topics which are also connected to social aspects such as development, sustainability, inequalities and employment issues.

Since 1998, I.S.E.O. has organized more than 50 international conferences and meetings that were attended by 40 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences, eminent economists from all over the world, Government officials, and representatives from entrepreneurial and trade union associations.

Following Franco Modigliani’s idea and with the precious support of Prof. Robert Solow, in 2004 I.S.E.O. organized the first edition of an international Summer School reserved to graduate students of Economics and Social Sciences which still takes place every year in Iseo, in June.
Throughout the years, the I.S.E.O. Summer School became the most well known activity of the I.S.E.O. Institute, which thanks to this summer course, started being popular and renowned in the academic environment all over the world. Participants of the I.S.E.O. Summer School are generally graduate and postgraduate students, young researchers coming from every corner of the world.

In 2006 the I.S.E.O Institute run the first edition of the European Colloquia series, together with Pioneer Investment: since that year, several edition of this international conference have been organized in some of the most important cities of the world, such as Prague, Wien, London, Bejing and Venice.

The full history of the I.S.E.O. Institute – how it all started, prof. Franco Modigliani’s first visit to Iseo in the ’90ies, curiosities and anecdotes – can be found in the book by Riccardo Venchiarutti “Un Nobel per amico”. A pdf version of the book (written in Italian) can be freely downloaded at the bottom of this web page.

The Honorary Chairman

Following the death of Nobel Laureate Robert Solow in December 2023, Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics 2001, has accepted to become the new honorary president of the I.S.E.O. Institute. This new role comes after his dedicated involvement in the I.S.E.O. Summer School in Economics for over two decades.

Andrew Michael Spence, born in 1943 in Montclair, New Jersey, is a distinguished American economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001. He held the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business position at the Stern School of Business at New York University and the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management role at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Additionally, he served as a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Spence is also an adjunct professor at Bocconi University in Milan and an honorary fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Alongside George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Spence was honored with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work on the theory of markets with asymmetric information. His research primarily revolves around economic policy in emerging markets, the economics of information, and the influence of leadership on economic growth. One of his notable contributions is the development of the theory of “signaling,” which illustrates how individuals with superior information in the market communicate with those who are less informed to mitigate the challenges associated with adverse selection.

In his educational journey, Spence pursued studies at Yale University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1972. Notably, in addition to the Nobel Prize, he received the David A. Wells Prize for his outstanding doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1972 and was honored with the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1982. Furthermore, he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been involved in various prestigious roles, including chairing an independent Commission on Growth and Development, which focuses on growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. He is also a distinguished member of the American Economic Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society.

The Founder

Franco Modigliani was born in 1918 in Rome where he received a Degree in Law from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1939. Because of the racial laws, he left that same year for New York and he received a D.S.S. from the New School for Social Research in 1944.
After teaching economics at the University of Illinois, Harvard University, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Northwestern University, in 1962 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of Economics and Finance and since 1988 he has been Institute Professor Emeritus.

Franco Modigliani‘s work on monetary theory, capital markets, macroeconomics and econometrics has been widely acclaimed. In 1985 Modigliani received the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award from MIT and he was made Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Republic. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets”.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is past President of the American Econometric Society, the American Economic Association and the American Finance Association, and honorary President of the International Economic Association. He has served as a consultant to the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve System, and a number of European banks.

He is the author of twenty books, volumes of his collected papers and numerous articles for scholarly journals. Among his best-known essays, The Collected Papers of Franco Modigliani, first published in five volumes by MIT Press, have been translated in many languages, including Chinese. His latest views on the recipe for balanced economic growth in Europe are presented in the “Manifesto against unemployment in Europe” (“BNL Quarterly Review”, September 1998), which he signed together with six other prominent economists.

He worked for the pension reform in Europe and Us.

Professor Franco Modigliani passes away, in his house of Boston, on the 25th of September 2003.

The Past President

Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 23, 1924.
He won a scholarship to Harvard college but, by the end of 1942 he left the University and joined the Us Army. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily and from the beginning to the end of the war in Italy.

Returned to Harvard in 1945 he studied economics with Wassily Leontieff and between 1949 and 1950 spent a fellowship year at Columbia University working on his Ph.D. thesys, an exploratory attempt to model changes in size distribution of wage income using interacting Markoff processes for employment-unemployment and wage rates. The thesis was awarded the Wells Prize at Harvard.

Then he accepted Assistant Professorship in the Economic Department of MIT. As professor Solow said he has “never had or wanted any other job”. He was given the office next to Paul Samuelson’s and “almost 40 years of almost daily conversations has been an immeasurably important part of my professional life”.

In 1987 professor Solow was awarded the Nobel prize for “his contribution to the theory of economic growth”. The study of the factors which permit production growth and increased welfare has been a central feature in economic research for many years and the Solow’s contributions have been exceptional.
Solow growth model was presented in an article entitled “A contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” in 1956.

Professor Solow has worked actively within many areas of economic theory, for example natural resource economics. Over the last decades Solow has largely devoted his research efforts to macroeconomic questions involving unemployment and economic policy.

He has been a member of the Us Presiden’s Council of Economic Adviser and he is actually Chairman of I.S.E.O. Institute (Institute for Studies on Economics and Employments).

The Board

HONORARY CHAIRMAN

Michael Spence
CHAIRMAN

Riccardo Venchiarutti
MEMBERS

Fabio Volpi, Tino Bino, Giuseppe Ioannes, Bruno Rinaldi
ACCOUNTANT

Downloadable documents

"Un Nobel per Amico" di Riccardo Venchiarutti

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