Profile

Honorary Research Fellow and former PhD Candidate (International Political Economy)

By focusing on ECB’s economic policy thinking and its internal politics of ideas, my doctoral research seeks to enhance scholarly understanding of ideational change inside international organisations (IOs). To do so, I ask the following research questions: (1) how has ECB’s economic policy thinking evolved since the outbreak of the euro crisis? and (2) what drives change in ECB’s ideas on the best way to deepen EMU in its fiscal and economic realms?

To answer these questions, fiscal policy, structural reforms and convergence towards resilient economic structures are used as case studies. The argument advanced in my PhD thesis is based on a qualitative analysis of relevant ECB publications as well as speeches of its leadership produced over the period 2001-2019. Evidence gathered from the analysis of ECB documents is triangulated with semi-structured interviews conducted with ECB officials across different Departments between 2018 and 2019.

My research finds that since the euro crisis there has been meaningful change in ECB ideas on fiscal policy and its capacity for macroeconomic stabilisation. ECB officials appreciated the limits of expansionary fiscal consolidation arguments, thereby placing less emphasis on crowding out and Ricardian equivalence in favour of new ideas such as a euro area fiscal stance and fiscal capacity. Important rethinking also occurred with regard to the design of fiscal rules and their limits to steer the euro area fiscal stance. Yet in the case of ECB's thinking on structural reforms I find that new ideas focused more on crafting a new rhetorical strategy around the need for reforms rather than redefining their core meaning.

Although a paradigm shift has not occurred in ECB’s economic policy thinking, I argue that the ECB adjusted their economic ideas by following the logic of bricolage, thereby leading to the juxtaposition of ideas coming from different paradigmatic homes. In so doing, these findings shed light on the dynamics and complexities of ideational change occurring within pivotal supranational institutions, pointing to the capacity of ECB officials to use ideas strategically and creatively.

Supervisors: Prof. Ben Clift and Dr. André Broome

Institutional Affiliations

Policy-making experience

Teaching Exprience

Research interests

• International Political Economy (IPE)
• Political Economy of European Monetary Integration
• Politics of Economic Ideas
• The Role of Economic Ideas in Policymaking

Iacopo's CurriculumLink opens in a new window