Author: Jacinta Duncan (MS IDEC ’26)
This summer, I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to Italy through the University of San Francisco’s International & Development Economics master’s program. Across 6 weeks, I found myself among the ruins of Pompeii, on an island known for its volcanic hot springs, cleaning snails for a festival, and sitting in on lectures from renowned economists.
After a day of field work.
Like any other country, Italy is rich with diversity within its own culture. Moving from city to city, you may hear differences in the dialect or notice a change in architectural style; we even found ourselves switching up our breakfast routine as we moved further south. However, between the North and the South, there is a stark contrast in development. Since the unification of Italy in the 19th century, many theories have emerged to try to explain Northern Italy’s ability to rapidly develop without the South.
In cooperation with the Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, and LUISS University, Team Italy set out to put the development theory of Amoral Familism to the test using modern experimental economics. Our design included a series of canonical economic games, followed by a questionnaire focused on cultural beliefs and opinions. Because our research centered around family dynamics, we needed places where families would be together and have time to participate in a 30 – 40-minute experiment. So, the most logical place we could think of was … beaches! Not too bad of an office, if you ask me. After spending some time planning in Rome (with some pit stops along the way, like it’s possible to come all this way and not visit the Colosseum, Pantheon, and the Trevi Fountain, or wander around the Borghese Gardens), we headed south!
Mount Vesuvius.
Our first stop was Naples, more specifically, the world’s most famous Neapolitan pizza restaurant. After finishing the most delicious pizza I’ve ever had, we got to work! Lucky for us, there was a coastal food festival happening while we were there, and this served as a great location to pilot our experiment. We got to finish each night checking out different stalls with Neapolitan-style dishes, my favorite being a pesto pasta with mussels. Since the festival was in the evening, we had our mornings and afternoons free, which one day we filled with a trip to Pompeii. This was my favorite experience from the whole trip. It was incredible to see how truly preserved the city was and to listen to the history archaeologists were able to uncover. They were able to determine which areas were restaurants, houses, bars, all from little details in the architecture and the art on the walls. The next day, we went to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples to see all the art, statues, and objects that were preserved. In a room dedicated to the women of Pompeii, it was incredible looking at their hairbrushes, hand mirrors, and hairpins that resembled my own.
Beautiful Ischia!
Right off the coast of Naples is an island called Ischia, known to the world for its therapeutic, volcanic hot springs, but known to me as the point for our first real experiment session. Pulling up in our ferry, we were speechless at how beautiful this island was and could not believe that this was where our field research was taking us. In our off time, we went swimming at the beach and had the favorite meal of the trip: swordfish pasta!
Afterwards, we spent the longest stretch of our trip in Otranto, one of the easternmost points in Italy; some days, we could see the Albanian mountain line! Here, we met an Italian PhD student at the Sapienza University of Rome who was from the area. She became our field coordinator, tourist guide, and good friend. Her family welcomed us with open arms every week for their big Sunday lunch, and we got to experience true Italian hospitality and meals that I, too, would pass down generation to generation. We also got to help prepare snails for the local snail festival! We spent every day on the beach, finding the true meaning of mixing business and leisure with our balance of running the experiment and swimming in the sea. Since we were in the deep end of our research, we ran into a couple of challenges. We could only run the experiment one family at a time since we only had one Italian speaker, and finding subjects was probably the most difficult part of the whole experience. But through it all, we were able to reach over 150 subjects! While we reached the end of the field research portion of the trip, we weren’t quite done with our time in Italy.
Cleaning snails.
We ended our trip by participating in an international summer school for behavioral and experimental economics in a small southern town called Soleto. Here, we met fellow master’s students, PhD students, and economics professors from all over the world and attended lectures and keynote speeches in various economic fields such as microfinance, climate, gender, and game theory. We really got a chance to think about how we wanted to analyze the data we collect, since we were learning in the moment how to interpret and play with data.
Soleto Summer School.
Overall, this trip was genuinely one of the most valuable experiences I’ve ever had. I got to participate in designing and implementing a real field experiment in behavioral economics and gained skills that are only possible in the field. I’m excited to keep developing this project this year and see where it goes!
