Assist. Prof. Vittorio Bassi, Ph.D.

Inner Workings of Firms and Job Searches

In one strand of his research, Vittorio Bassi studies the organization of production across and within firms in dense and growing African cities. The goal of this agenda is to understand the constraints that small firms face in increasing their productivity and creating jobs. In a complementary line of research, he focuses on the inner workings of large factories in India and South America, to study how these large firms leverage their internal organization of labor as well as worker training to meet production requirements and to facilitate the learning of new tasks over the product cycle. Finally, he studies how young workers look for jobs and barriers to employment in African cities, focusing on the role of skills training, search frictions, and expectations.

Vittorio Bassi’s main research field is development economics, with interests in labor and organizational economics. He conducts research on the organization of production and urban labor markets in developing countries. One overarching innovation of his research approach is the meticulous collection of data on the inner workings of firms and how workers look for jobs, through both novel surveys and administrative personnel records, which are then combined with RCTs or structural models.

While at CES, Mr. Bassi will work on projects studying the role of firm-to-firm interactions in informal clusters for mitigating misallocation of resources, as well as the implications of under-utilization of factors of production for human capital accumulation and investment in training in small firms in Africa.

Vittorio Bassi is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California, and Lead Academic of the Uganda Country Team of the International Growth Center. He is also NBER, CEPR, J-PAL and CEGA Affiliate, and International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Mr. Bassi completed his PhD in Economics from University College London in 2017.