FACULTY
Daniele Tavani
daniele.tavani@colostate.eduC325 Clark Building
970.491.6657 - 970.491.2925 Fax
Teaching Philosophy
My primary goal as a teacher is to train my students to think like social scientists, and economists in particular: isolate the fundamental causes behind the phenomenon of interest from `noise' variables, understand the intuitions and the processes which lead to writing down a model describing such phenomenon, question the model's predictions and be able to support or refuse them by empirical analysis. I believe that, no matter what career they will pursue, college graduates aware of the questions social scientists address, and experienced in problem-solving, will be better off in understanding the world around them.
I aim to create an environment where students not only learn about facts or theories, but develop their own understanding of social phenomena, and their own informed, critical positions on the issues.
Research
I am a macro theorist with interests mainly on technological change, in particular the composition, or direction, of technical progress. In my recent research papers, I study: a) the optimal composition of technological progress in presence of environmental constraints; b) how technological change shapes industrial relations between bosses and workers; c) what are the distributional impacts of technical advancements. I have also been working on nonlinear dynamics and models of the business cycle.
Recent Work
`Wage Bargaining and Induced Technical Progress in a Linear Economy: Model and Application to the US (1963-2003)', March '09, submitted.
`Directed Technical Change with Congestion of a Limited Natural Resource', February `09, submitted.
`Estimated Non-linearities and Multiple Equilibria in a Model of Distributive-Demand Cycles' (with Peter Flaschel, Lance Taylor and Timo Teuber), revised and resubmitted, Metroeconomica. Current version: January `09.
`The Role of Technology in Factor-Discipline and the Bias of Technical Change: a Microeconomic Analysis', May `08, under revision.