Alberto Alesina

Alberto Francesco Alesina (29 April 1957 – 23 May 2020) was an Italian economist who was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University from 2003 until his death in 2020.

[7] He attended a classical lyceum in Milan, before enrolling at Bocconi University to study economics and social sciences, where he received a laurea in 1981.

Assuming that Ricardian equivalence and the permanent income hypothesis hold, actors' expected future wealth would increase and induce them to consume more.

Alesina’s advocacy of austerity was strongly criticised by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who published "How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled" in the New York Review of Books in June 2013, in which he noted the influence of pro-austerity articles authored by Alesina and his supporters, and described the work of the “Bocconi Boys” as "a full frontal assault on the Keynesian proposition that cutting spending in a weak economy produces further weakness".

[19] More recently, studies by the IMF and others have cast doubt on the methodological underpinning of Alesina's work, and conclude that the evidence is more likely to suggest a contractionary effect of fiscal consolidation.