Michela Giorcelli

Michela Giorcelli is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California – Los Angeles. She is also a Faculty Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate at CEPR, CESifo, IZA, J-PAL and CCPR. She serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Economic History. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Prof. Giorcelli is an economic historian and an applied microeconomist, whose research focuses on the managerial and technological drivers of productivity and innovation in the long run. Her book project, Professionals and Productivity: The Diffusion of Soft Technologies during and after WWII, under contract with Princeton University Press, analyzes the role of WWII in spurring the adoption of management practices in the US and their diffusion in Europe and Japan in the aftermath of the war.

Her work has appeared in leading economic journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the NBER. Prof. Giorcelli has been a keynote speaker and panelist at numerous US and international conferences.

Her research has been awarded the Masahiko Aoki Award for Economics Paper (2023), the Kiel Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs (2020) for contributions to the fields of economic history and innovation, the Gerschenkron Prize (2017), the Landau Prize for the best student-written SIEPR working paper (2016), and the Kauffman Foundation Fellowship Award (2016). During her undergraduate studies, Prof. Giorcelli was a recipient of the Optime Prize awarded to the best undergraduate student of the University of Torino (2009 and 2011), the Laureato dell’Anno Prize for the best graduate of the Economics Department (2011) and the gold medal for the best dissertation in the Economics Department (2012). She has received the UCLA Warren C. Scoville Award for Distinguished Teaching.