# Eleonora Patacchini

Eleonora Patacchini is an economist specializing in applied economics and applied statistics who grew up in Italy with her mother who was also a professor. She is a professor and associate department chair at Cornell University in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on the empirical analysis of behavioral models of strategic interactions for decision making. Patacchini is an associate editor at Journal of Urban Economics and Statistical Methods & Applications. She is a columnist at the VOX CEPR Policy Portal where research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists are published frequently. She is also a co-editor of E-journal Economics and associate editor of the Journal of Urban Economics.

## Education

Patacchini studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in the field of sciences. She went on to pursue a Master of Science in economics at the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain, after which point she returned to Italy to complete her Ph.D. in statistics in 2003 at the Sapienza University of Rome. Patacchini then pursued her second Ph.D. in the field of economics at the University of Southampton.

## Selected journal publications

"Mothers, Peers, and Gender-Role Identity" in the Journal of the European Economic Association and "Social Networks in Policy Making" in the Annual Review of Economics.
Patacchini's research primarily focuses on behavioral economics where an individual's behavior is influenced by the immediate social contacts or circle, particularly the role of women in economy. Her work also explores the labor market impacts through the dimensions within families and social circles such as friendships and other relationships. Her work has also focused on the cultural norms that shapes decision making in the context of women in the workforce and the role of social connections and/or relationships in legislatures, especially the US Congress and how it influences policy making.
"Self-control and peer groups: An empirical analysis" in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Patacchini has conducted an empirical analysis with Marco Battaglini and Carlos Díaz on self-control and peer groups, where they found evidence consistent with the two key predictions of this theory regarding the relationship between an agent's expected level of self-control and the size and composition of his or her social circles: (i) students embedded in social circles have more self-control than those who are alone and their self-control is increasing in the size of their social group; (ii) students’ self-control is, however, a non-monotonic hump-shaped function of the average self-control of their friends.
"Treatment Effects With Heterogeneous Externalities" in the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics
In this article, Tiziano Arduini, Eleonora Patacchini and Edoardo Rainone propose a new method for estimating heterogeneous externalities in policy analysis when social interactions take the linear-in-means form. They establish that the parameters of interest can be identified and consistently estimated using specific functions of the share of the eligible population. Conditional cash transfers, or similar welfare programs, generate indirect effects on untreated subjects in the presence of social interactions. The analysis of heterogeneous indirect effects is complicated because of simultaneity issues arising from social interactions.

## Research interests

Patacchini has described her research interests as "My strategy is to develop sound econometrics techniques, together with a theoretical model that can guide the interpretation of the results. My papers acquire different connotations according to the definition of space considered, i.e., according to the sources of interdependence between economic agents. In my research I use three main qualifications of the spatial dimension: (i) social networks; (ii) residential location; (iii) culture."