Nicolò Badino

How much a household suffers from inflation depends on what it consumes. We show that this simple observation links household expenditure behavior to inflation inequality, welfare losses, and poverty. Building on a non-homothetic CES demand system, we derive household-specific exact cost-of-living indexes and apply them to the 2022 European energy crisis in Spain and Italy. Using household expenditure microdata, we estimate non-homothetic preferences and show that the same expenditure patterns governing Engel curves also determine households’ welfare sensitivity to inflation. Consequently, poorer households face substantially larger welfare losses than would be implied by inflation differentials alone, while Italian households exhibit systematically greater welfare sensitivity than comparable Spanish households. Under an anchored poverty line, a common price deflator conceals 1.6 million newly poor in Spain, while in Italy it is nearly innocuous, because the shock is already large enough to push the same households below the line. Our results caution against relying on a single representative-agent price index to assess the distributional consequences of large relative-price shocks.

This paper studies how climatic cooling during the Little Ice Age may have affected the incentives to innovate in pre-industrial agriculture. The core argument is that colder regions faced stronger pressure to adapt, which increased labor effort, learning-by-doing, and the accumulation of productive knowledge. We develop a model of induced innovation and show how divergence in agricultural productivity between regions can emerge even when they face similar climatic shocks.

This paper examines how industrialization spread across Europe and emphasizes the role of spatial frictions. Using patents as a proxy for innovation, it studies how roads, waterways, coal access, and geographic connectivity shaped the diffusion of industrial activity from Britain to the rest of Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.

We extend the Hotelling framework to a two-dimensional market with heterogeneous population density. Firms offer a homogeneous good but compete in price and location simultaneously. The model can generate agglomeration, dispersion, and richer equilibrium patterns than the standard linear-city setup, with the broader goal of connecting spatial competition theory more closely to realistic geographic environments.

I study the optimal spatial allocation of health care facilities from the perspective of a central planner who aims to minimize the average distance between citizens and facilities. Using Italian public data, I show that the current distribution of pharmacies, largely shaped by historical and political constraints, is approximately 40% less efficient than the optimal benchmark.

Since 1 August 2023, Italian retail gas stations have been required to display regional average fuel prices alongside their own. We construct a difference-in-differences design to isolate the effect of this disclosure requirement on the national average price of gasoline from concurrent economic factors.