Francesco Amodio joined McGill University in 2015 as Assistant Professor, jointly appointed by the Department of Economics and ISID. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He is a development economist specialized in quantitative methods. His research program is organized around two main pillars. One of them is the study of the constraints faced by firms and public organizations in developing countries. His past research has mainly focused on the operations of privately owned firms in Latin America and the Middle East.
Professor Amodio is currently expanding this research to public organizations. In collaboration with the World Bank Group, he has been part of the research team that designed and implemented an incentive scheme for business tax inspectors in the Kyrgyz Republic, with the objective of increasing regulatory transparency and reducing harassment on small and medium enterprises.
The second pillar of Professor Amodio’s research is the political economy of democratization, and the interaction between formal and informal institutions in consolidating democracies. Together with a number of coauthors, Prof. Amodio is working on several projects that look at South Africa as a case study. In the first of these projects, they explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and violence during the democratic transition. In their most recent work, they are focusing on how the interactions between local politicians (formal institutions) and traditional chief leaders (informal institutions) shape the allocation of land and labor across different ethnic groups.
