Alessandra Casella


Alessandra Casella is an economist, researcher, professor, and author. Currently, she is an Economic and Political Science professor at Columbia University.

Life

Casella received her Bachelor's degree with a summa cum laude in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, Milan, in March 1983. She furthered her studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her Masters and Ph.D. in Economics, 1988. Her thesis' focused on hyperinflation and the real exchange rates and supply shocks in the economy. After graduating, Casella's research continues to focus on Economics, with more specific interests in public economics, experimental economics, and political economy.
In 2019, Casella was the director of the Columbia Laboratory for the Social Sciences, and a fellow in both the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge and the British Center for Economic Policy Research. She is the author of two books: Networks and Markets. Contributions from Economics and Sociology and Storable Votes: Protecting the Minority Voice.

Career

Academic

Alessandra Casella started her teaching career at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor from 1987 to 1993. From 1996 to 2010, she was the part-time Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales based in Paris, France. In the time between her career in UC Berkeley and Director in EHESS, Casella became an associate Professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York, from 1993 till 1997. Her career with Columbia University continued where she eventually became a Professor of Economics at Columbia University in 1997 until current. Since then, Casella has taught Ph.D. courses in Experimental Methods in Political Economy and Special Topics in Political Economics. She has also taught undergraduate classes in Political Economy and Experimental Economics. Since 2017, Casella has also become a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.

Journals

Alessandra Casella has received several research grants throughout her career. Casella received her first grant with her colleague James Rauch for research on "Anonymous Market and Coethnic Ties in International Trade." The National Science Foundation gave the grant from 1997 - 2001. From 2002 - 2005, the National Science Foundation gave her another grant for research in "Storable Votes". From 2006 - 2012, Casella continued to work with the National Science Foundation and received a supplementary grant to continue research on "Storable Votes, Part II". In March 2018, Casella received a seed grant on "Strategic Focus in Games: An Experiment" from the ISERP, Columbia University.

Selected scholarships

"A Property Rights Approach to Temporary Work Visas" (2018)

Working with her colleague Adam B. Cox, Casella creates a model that would address the problems that the temporary labor visa has in the United States. The three main concerns are: inefficient visa allocation, inability to protect domestic workers, and exploitation of migrant workers. The model focuses on reconfiguring the property rights by allocating a fixed number of temporary labor visas each year to maximize social surplus. Additional benefits that come with the model are minimized negative impact and exploitation of domestic and migrant workers. The goal of the proposed model would be creating a market with increased domestic employment, gains for both the government and foreign workers, and mitigated cost to firms through efficient labor allocation. To achieve this goal, Casella focuses on unbundling multiple property rights and redistributing them through market mechanisms that could counter the three main concerns of the current U.S. temporary labor visa rules.

"Communication in context: Interpreting promises in an experiment on competition and trust" (2017)

In this paper, Alessandra Casella and her colleagues, Navin Kartika, Luis Sancheza, and Sébastien Turbana, study people’s tendencies to lie and the amount of trust that is associated in communication when lying is an option. Casella takes a closer look at understanding the way communication is interpreted by creating a trust game experiment. The study, approved by Columbia University and New York University Institutional Review Boards, was done online and in the laboratory via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The participants for the experiment were students enrolled at New York University. The game consisted of a sender and a receiver where the sender decides how to split $10. The study found that the senders are affected by competition, leading to higher offers. However, the findings show no effect on the expected transfer, the transfer itself, nor the receiver. Nonetheless, the results of the study showed that competition does alter communication understanding between participants.

"Democracy Undone. Systematic Minority Advantage in Competitive Vote Markets" (2014)

Alessandra Casella worked with Sébastien Turban to study the competitive equilibrium of the voting market. In this market, before making a decision, voters can trade their vote in for numeraire. In elections where majority wins, it is known that the voters are treated equally with symmetrical options, which leads to sincere voting. However, this voting method does not take into account the intensity of voters’ preferences. Without knowing the intensity of the vote, it is difficult to maximize the utilitarian welfare. This research aims to resolve this issue by creating a market for votes. The idea of this research is to apply the concept of efficient goods allocation in the market to the voting market. If goods are allocated to individuals who value them the most, the same logic applied to votes will maximize utilitarian welfare. Casella and Turban study the conditions required to create an equilibrium in the voting market before the voting itself takes place.

"Why Personal Ties Cannot Be Bought" (2006)

Alessandra Casella and Nobuyuki Hanak study the debate economists and sociologists have about whether social networks can be artificially created. Information and trust between personal networks are a vital part of job applications, creating new capital, and moving. Especially when dealing with business, having personal ties can further economic success. Economists often believe that appropriate market mechanisms and policies can replace the lack of personal relations. On the other hand, Sociologists do often think that it is a personal relationship that develops naturally and, therefore, cannot be artificially replicated. The method of research was by borrowing James D. Montgomery's elegant model of the network. The results found that there were two types of networks: costless network and costly network. The costless network is personal referrals, which is often preferred for hiring because it requires less effort. However, the costly network is when people intentionally create personal connections, which can become a costly activity.

Academic publications

YearTitlePublicationAuthor
1984Elasticita' di Sostituzione tra Energia, Capitale e Lavoro nel Settore Manifatturiero Italiano 1960-1978Giornale degli Economisti, XLIII, 491-505.Alessandra Casella
1989Integracion Monetaria Europea y la Economia de la Sostitucion de MonedasInformacion Comercial Espanola, November, 47-50.Alessandra Casella
1989Testing for Rational Bubbles with Exogenous or Endogenous Fundamentals: the German Hyperinflation Once MoreJournal of Monetary Economics, 24,109-122.Alessandra Casella
1990Economic Exchange during HyperinflationJournal of Political Economy, 98, 1-27.Alessandra Casella & Jonathan Feinstein
1992Federalism and Clubs. Towards an Economic Theory of Overlapping Political JurisdictionsEuropean Economic Review, 36, 639-646.Alessandra Casella & Bruno Frey
1992A Note on Bargaining and InflationEconomic Letters, 38, 393-398.Alessandra Casella & Jonathan Feinstein
1992On Markets and Clubs.  Economic and Political Integration of Regions with Unequal ProductivityAmerican Economic Review, 82, 115-121.Alessandra Casella
1992Participation in a Currency UnionAmerican Economic Review, 82, 847-863.Alessandra Casella
1994Trade as Engine of Political Change. A ParableEconomica, 61, 267-284.Alessandra Casella
1996On Market Integration and the Development of Institutions.  The Case of International Commercial ArbitrationEuropean Economic Review, 40, 155-186.  .Alessandra Casella
1996Large Countries, Small Countries and the Enlargement of Trade BlocsEuropean Economic Review, 40, 389-415.Alessandra Casella
1996Can Foreign Aid Accelerate Stabilization?The Economic Journal, 106, 605-619.Alessandra Casella & Barry Eichengreen
1999Tradable Deficit Permits.  Efficient Implementation of the Stability Pact in the European Monetary UnionEconomic Policy, 29, 323-361..Alessandra Casella
2001Product Standards and International Trade. Harmonization through Private Coalitions?Kyklos, 54, 243-264. Alessandra Casella
2001The Role of Market Size in the Formation of JurisdictionsThe Review of Economic Studies, 68, 83-108.Alessandra Casella
2001Market Mechanisms for Policy Decisions. Tools for the European UnionEuropean Economic Review, 45, 995-1006.Alessandra Casella
2002Public Goods in Trade: On the Formation of Markets and JurisdictionsInternational Economic Review, 43, 437-462.Alessandra Casella & Jonathan Feinstein
2002Anonymous Market and Group Ties in International TradeJournal of International Economics, 58, 19-47.
Alessandra Casella & James Rauch
2003Overcoming Informational Barriers in International Resource Allocations: Prices and TiesThe Economic Journal, 113, 21-42.Alessandra Casella & James Rauch
2005Storable VotesGames and Economic Behavior, 51, 391-419.Alessandra Casella
2005Redistribution Policy: A European ModelJournal of Public Economics, 89, 1305-1331.Alessandra Casella
2006Why Personal Ties Cannot Be BoughtAmerican Economic Review, 96, 2, 261-264.Alessandra Casella & Nobuyuki Hanaki
2006An Experimental Study of Storable VotesGames and Economic Behavior, 57, 123-154.Alessandra Casella, Andrew Gelman, & Thomas Palfrey
2007Storable Votes: Protecting Minorities without Sacrificing EfficiencyCESifo DICE Report, 5, 3, 17-22.Alessandra Casella, Thomas Palfrey, & Raymond Riezman
2008Information Channels in Labor Markets. On the Resilience of Referral HiringJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 66, 492-513.Alessandra Casella & Nobuyuki Hanaki
2008A Simple Scheme to Improve the Efficiency of ReferendaJournal of Public Economics, 92: 2240-2261.Alessandra Casella & Andrew Gelman
2008Minorities and Storable VotesQuarterly Journal of Political Science, 3: 165-200.Alessandra Casella, Thomas Palfrey, & Raymond Riezman
2010Protecting Minorities in Large Binary Elections. A Test of Storable Votes Using Field DataThe B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 10: Iss. 1.  Alessandra Casella, Shuky Ehrenberg, Andrew Gelman, & Jie Shen
2011Agenda Control as a Cheap Talk Game. Theory and Experiments with Storable VotesGames and Economic Behavior, 72: 46-76.Alessandra Casella
2012Competitive Equilibrium in Markets for VotesJournal of Political Economy, 120: 593-658.Alessandra Casella, Aniol Llorente-Saguer & Thomas Palfrey
2014Vote Trading with and without Party LeadersJournal of Public Economics, 112:115-128.Alessandra Casella, Thomas Palfrey, & Sebastien Turban
2014Democracy Undone. Systematic Minority Advantage in Competitive Vote MarketsGames and Economic Behavior, 88: 47-70.Alessandra Casella & Sebastien Turban
2017Storable Votes and Judicial Nominations in the U.S. SenateJournal of Theoretical Politics, 29: 243-272.Alessandra Casella, Sébastien Turban, & Gregory Wawro
2017Democracy for Polarized Committees. The Tale of Blotto’s LieutenantsGames and Economic Behavior, 106, 239-259.Alessandra Casella, Jean-Francois Laslier, & Antonin Macé
2018Communication in Context: Interpreting Promises in an Experiment on Competition and TrustPNAS, 115 933-938.Alessandra Casella, Navin Kartik, Luis Sanchez, & Sébastien Turban
2018A Property Rights Approach to Temporary Work VisasJournal of Legal Studies, 47, S195-S227.Alessandra Casella & Adam Cox

Working papers

YearBookChapterPublication
1989A European Central Bank?"Management of a Common Currency" p. 131-156Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
1992Establishing a Central Bank"Voting on the Adoption of a Common Currency" p. 164-184Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
1994Monetary Regimes in Transition"Halting Inflation in Italy and France after World War II" p. 312-345Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
1995Politics and Institutions in an Integrated Europe"Elements for a Theory of Jurisdictional Change" p. 11-41Springer: New York and Heidelberg
1996Harmonization and Fair Trade"Free Trade and Evolving Standards" p. 119-156MIT Press: Cambridge
2001Ökonomie als Grundlage politischer Entscheidungen"Policy Coordination and National Sovereignty in a Monetary Union. Two Easy Recipes" p., 199-217Leske plus Budrich: Opladen
2001Networks and Markets“Concluding Remarks. Questions for Policy” p. 328-337
2001The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries"Games for Central Bankers. Markets vs Politics in Public Policy Decisions" p. 11-27Oxford University Press: Oxford