The Ruling Class: Management and Politics in Modern Italy (Fondazione Rodolfo Debendetti Reports)

The ruling class plays a major role in society. It makes possible what would otherwise be infeasible, by removing constraints that may stand in the way of long-term growth. Historically, economists devoted far less attention than sociologists to the study of ruling classes. Using the theoretical tools of economists, this volume provides an understanding of what drives the formation of a ruling class, and the relationship between politics and business firms. Focusing on Italy, it uses labour economics to analyse the selection of the ruling class, the labour market of politicians, the allocation of managers' time, and their incentives, remunerations, and career paths. It draws on contributions from two teams of leading scholars and on research undertaken by the Fondazione Rodolfo DeBenedetti.

Part I focuses on the labor market of politicians. It uses detailed information on personal characteristics, incomes, performance in office, and career paths (both before and after the Parliamentary mandate) of all the politicians elected to the Italian Lower Chamber (Camera) between 1948 and 2008. This is the first time that this information has been gathered and summarized in key indicators. Part II is devoted to the managerial class. It includes cross-country surveys of managers across a sample of European countries, surveys carried out in cooperation with the largest union of managers in the service sector, social security records, and, for the first time, surveys on the allocation of time for top executives.

Tito Boeri is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Milan and acts as Scientific Director of the Fondazione Rodolfo DeBenedetti. He is research fellow at CEPR, IZA, and Igier-Bocconi. His research interests include labour economics, redistributive policies, and political economics. He has published with Oxford University Press and MIT Press, and his papers have been published in several leading journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economic Policy, and the European Economic Review. After obtaining his PhD in Economics from New York University, he was Senior Economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1987 to 1996. He has also acted as consultant to the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the ILO, the World Bank, and the Italian Government.
Antonio Merlo is the Lawrence R. Klein Professor of Economics and the Director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research (PIER) at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a research fellow of CEPR and CESifo and a Research Associate of NBER. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics. Before joining the Economics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Merlo taught at the University of Minnesota and New York University. His areas of expertise are political economy, public economics, bargaining theory and applications, and empirical microeconomics. His research interests include the economics of crime, voting, the career decisions of politicians, the formation and dissolution of coalition governments, the industrial organization of the political sector, and the study of the residential housing market. He has published numerous articles in leading journals, including the American Economic Review and Econometrica. Andrea Prat is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1997. Professor Prat is Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and serves as a council member of the European Economic Association. His work focuses on political economy and organization economics, and he uses new conceptual tools (such as network economics and computational complexity) and collects new datasets (such as the CEO time use survey discussed in this volume) to deepen our understanding of how firms work. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Econometrica.