Bruno Contini on life under Mussolini and the Italian labor market today

Bruno Contini, Professor Emeritus of the University of Turin and Honorary Fellow of the Collegio Carlo Alberto, joins the podcast to discuss his childhood under fascism, his experience studying and teaching in the United States, and his expertise on Italian labor markets

In this episode, Contini and Ashenfelter discuss:

• Contini’s childhood during the war and his father’s confinement by the fascists in 1939. The family first lived in a Jewish community in northern Italy, then in Palestine, then in a small village in the Apennine mountains, and finally, after–after the fall of Mussolini–in Naples and then Rome. Contini ultimately graduated high school in San Francisco.

• The role Franco Modigliani played in Contini’s acceptance to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) and Jack Muth’s influence on Contini’s early studies.

• An early paper of Contini’s published in the American Economic Review, which was the first ever paper in the field to use experimental work. 

• Why Contini joined the University of Turin in 1971, and the legislative and administrative obstacles he overcame to produce the Work Histories Italian Panel (WHIP) of labor microdata in the 1980s.

• The founding of LABORatorio–a joint project of the University of Turin and the Compagnia di San Paolo for the study of labor issues in Italy and the European Union–in honor of Contini’s co-author and friend Riccardo Revelli. 

• Contini’s assessment of why the post-1990s Italian economy continued to fall vis-a-vis other European countries. 

Bruno Contini earned his Ph.D. at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in 1966. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced as Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section) celebrates its 100th anniversary—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.