In Memoriam: Prof. Giancarlo Marini

It is with immense sadness that the Department of Economics and Law of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” marks the loss of its Director, Professor Giancarlo Marini, who died on 23rd April 2013. A highly intelligent and enthusiastic colleague, Giancarlo was in the forefront of Departmental changes following the recent university reform of 2010. He worked tirelessly in support of research in the department, especially of our young researchers. He was a good and loyal friend and will be deeply missed by all of us.

Giancarlo was a macroeconomist with interests in the analysis of fiscal policy, public debt, monetary policy and international economics. He gained his Ph.D. in Economics in 1985 under the supervision of Prof. Willem Buiter at the world-renowned London School of Economics and Political Sciences where he was also a Lecturer in Economics from 1984 to 88. In 1985 his Ph.D was awarded the Royal Economic Society’s prestigious Sayer’s Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in the UK.

After his stay in England he moved back to Italy, where he started his career as an Associate Professor at the University of Bari in 1988. Annalisa Rosselli, his former colleague in Bari, recalls how “his professional profile and international recognition enriched the research environment of the Faculty”. He then became a Full Professor of Economics at the University of Siena and, from 1993, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. He was elected Director of the Department of Economics and Law in 2007 and re-elected in 2012. He was also Director of the PhD and MSc Programs in International Economics.

He was renowned for his personal integrity and meticulous research. In his early research years, his interests were mainly focused on the role of fiscal and monetary policy. In the years immediately after his PhD, he published two papers in the prestigious Economic Journal, the first on fiscal policies and intertemporal preferences (Intertemporal Substitution and the Role of Monetary Policy, 1985) and the second on the interplay between fiscal, monetary policies and capital accumulation (Monetary and Fiscal Policy in an Optimising Model with Capital Accumulation and Finite Lives with F. van der Ploeg, 1988). Since then, he published many more papers in journals such as the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, the B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, the Journal of Population Economics, the Journal of Banking and Finance,the Journal of Economics, The Manchester School, Oxford Economic Papers, Economica, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and Economics Letters, to name just a few. A full account of Giancarlo’s research and publications can be found on his personal webpage.

In recent years Giancarlo explored other interesting research questions such as the inflationary bias after the advent of the Euro. He had a special gift for developing exciting and provocative ideas and was able to make “the dismal science” captivating while having fun in the process. One night, shortly after the introduction of the euro, he was facing an exorbitant bill at a restaurant in Venice. He checked his tourist guide, where prices were still reported in Italian liras. With a sense of disbelief, he discovered that the restaurant had roughly doubled its prices since the changeover from the lira. At that point, most economists would have gone to sleep and forgotten about it, but Giancarlo had an idea: why not use tourist guides to assess the impact of the euro on restaurant prices in a systematic way? The final article The Inflationary Consequences of a Currency Changeover: Evidence from the Michelin Red Guide, co-authored with Pasquale Scaramozzino and Fabrizio Adriani, generated an interesting derivative literature and made headlines in the main European newspapers

Giancarlo’s interests and intellectual curiosity spanned other areas, such as the theory of growth and environmental economics. One of his most cited papers, written with his co-author and friend Pasquale Scaramozzino, analyses intertemporal market failures in the use of environmental resources as a consequence of the selfish behavior of each generation (Overlapping Generations and Environmental Control, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 1995). Giancarlo suggested possible ways of overcoming the self-centred behaviour of current generations in order to achieve environmental sustainability for the benefit of all future generations.

Giovanni Piersanti, Barbara Annicchiarico and Alessandro Piergallini also established an enduring personal and academic collaboration with Giancarlo. They wrote extensively on fiscal deficits, exchange rates and the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy. Most of these papers recognize the importance of wealth effects in affecting both the transmission mechanism of monetary policy and the inflationary effects of fiscal expansions.  One of these papers, written in collaboration with Giovanni Piersanti, dealing with currency and financial crises in a dynamic optimizing general equilibrium model was awarded the Istanbul Stock Exchange Best Finance Paper Award in 2002. In the last few years, they also wrote two papers focusing on 'the sustainability of EMU' and on 'the perceived risk of a Euro break-up'. This last paper was completed just before his untimely death.

In the last few months, Giancarlo spent much of his time developing ideas about how to help Italy to get out of the current economic and financial crisis. In particular, he pointed out that it was irresponsible for financial markets and spread dynamics to be left unregulated. He welcomed with some relief the decision of the ECB to launch the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) initiative, but at the same time his macroeconomic background convinced him that too much fiscal discipline was detrimental because it depressed internal demand. This is why he was strongly in favor of a more expansionary fiscal and monetary EU policy as the only way to save the euro. His work and ideas led to three articles which were published on the Financial Times Link and several others in the Italian and international press

Giancarlo had also recently become fascinated by behavioural economics, as Leonardo Becchetti recalls: “This was the topic of our frequent meetings, as Giancarlo had decided to research this field in order to study how card games such as bridge (his great passion) could help to build social preferences stimulating social capital formation”.

In his final years Giancarlo combined his own research with a project he firmly believed in – the construction of the Department of Economics and Law – in which he invested a huge amount of time and energy. Marcello Messori, his former colleague at Tor Vergata and now at LUISS University, recalls how Giancarlo reconciled the two: “I remember the long discussions about the future of the Department that we had in Giancarlo’s office at Tor Vergata. When the difficulties in dealing with the complexities of the Italian University system threatened to overwhelm us, Giancarlo’s face darkened for a while. But then he looked at one of the wonderful pictures painted by his brother on the office wall, and he quickly turned his mind to more stimulating problems; it was time to resume our discussion on the future of European economic and monetary union. I will miss these long chats, which often ended at the faculty bar, and it is very painful to know that we will never be able to have them again.”

And now we will all miss him. Not just his friends, family and colleagues, but also his students and the whole community at the University of Tor Vergata, where he worked for almost two decades. Memories from his former friends, co-authors and colleagues can be found at the University webpage dedicated to Giancarlo’s memory