About

Marco Battaglini is the Edward H. Meyer Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, obtained in 2000. His academic interests include Political Economy, Economic Theory, and Contract Theory. As a faculty member in the Department of Economics within the College of Arts and Sciences, he is engaged in research and teaching related to these fields, contributing to the understanding of strategic interactions, economic incentives, and the influence of political and social factors on economic outcomes.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Econometrics
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Law
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Public economics
• Mathematical economics
• Social psychology
• Algorithm

Selected publications

• Chaos and unpredictability with time inconsistent policy makers

  Theoretical Economics · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We analyze the existence of equilibria with complex dynamics in a policy framework with time inconsistency. We consider an economy where, in each period, the policy maker in power determines the level of a durable public good (or bad) that creates strategic linkages across policy periods. When the decision‐making process is time consistent—such as when a benevolent planner sets policy in every period—the economy exhibits a unique equilibrium where the state converges to a deterministic steady state. When the identity of the decision maker changes probabilistically over time as in a political equilibrium, the decision‐making process becomes time inconsistent. In this scenario, we identify conditions under which equilibria with cycles of more than two periods and chaotic dynamics can emerge. Depending on the economy's fundamental parameters, these equilibria may produce ergodic distributions in which the state variable either persistently overshoots the planner's steady state or fluctuates around it. The extent of chaotic behavior is influenced by the degree of time inconsistency: as the degree of time inconsistency approaches zero, the size of the support of the ergodic distribution converges to zero as well.

  PublisherDOI

• Welfare in the volunteer’s dilemma

  Journal of Public Economics · 2025-04-07

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Welfare in the Volunteer's Dilemma

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tax Professionals and Tax Evasion

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-12-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Using unique data covering the entire population of sole proprietorships in Italy with their respective audit files, we examine the role of tax advisors in tax compliance. Exploiting quasi-random variation in audit policy, we document that tax advisors act as information hubs, gathering privileged information on the auditing policy from their activities and incorporating it into the tax return strategy of their clients. The heterogeneity in tax advisors’ willingness to serve this role establishes a market for intermediated tax evasion, in which taxpayers sort themselves on the basis of the tax advisors’ tolerance for it.

  PublisherDOI

• Welfare in the Volunteer’s Dilemma

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We study the volunteer's dilemma in environments with heterogeneous preferences and private information.We characterize the efficiency properties of equilibrium, which is a departure from all the previous literature that focuses only on the probability of group success.While the probability of success may be non-monotonic in the size of the group, we show that per-capita welfare is always increasing for all types, strictly for sufficiently high types.As group size increases, the expected utility of every type converges to the expected utility of the type with the lowest possible cost, which is the same expected utility when there is no free rider problem, i.e., when there is only a single player in the game and that player has the lowest possible cost.

  PublisherDOI

• Refining public policies with machine learning: The case of tax auditing

  Journal of Econometrics · 2024-09-23 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We study how machine learning techniques can be used to improve tax auditing efficiency using administrative data without the need of randomized audits. Using Italy’s population data on sole proprietorship tax returns and audits, our new approach addresses the challenge that predictions must be trained on human-selected data. There are substantial margins for raising revenue from audits by improving the selection of taxpayers to audit with machine learning. Replacing the 10% least promising audits with an equal number selected by our algorithm raises detected tax evasion by as much as 39%, and evasion that is actually paid back by 29%.

  PublisherDOI

• Unobserved Contributions and Political Influence: Evidence from the Death of Top Donors

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-07-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It has long been observed that there is little money in U.S. politics compared to the stakes.But what if contributions are not fully observable or non-monetary in nature and thus not easily quantifiable?We study this question with a new data set on the top 1000 donors in U.S. congressional races.Since top donors do not randomly support candidates, we propose an identification strategy based on information about top donors' deaths and the observed variations in candidates' performance after these events.The death of a top donor significantly decreases a candidate's chances of being elected in the current and future election cycles.Moreover, it affects the legislative activities of elected candidates.These effects do not depend on top donors' monetary contributions to a candidate but on their prominence and their total contributions during the election campaign.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Welfare in the Volunteer's Dilemma

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unobserved Contributions and Political Influence: Evidence from the Death of Top Donors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Organizing for Collective Action: Olson Revisited

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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Recent grants

• CAREER: A Legislative Theory of Public Spending, Debt and Taxation

  NSF · $54k · 2014–2015

• CAREER: A Legislative Theory of Public Spending, Debt and Taxation

  NSF · $400k · 2006–2014

• Long-Term Contracting with Markovian Agents

  NSF · $142k · 2004–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Eleonora Patacchini

  138 shared

• Valerio Leone Sciabolazza

  92 shared

• Stephen Coate

  Cornell University

  47 shared

• Thomas R. Palfrey

  California Institute of Technology

  29 shared

• Roland Bénabou

  25 shared

• Salvatore Nunnari

  15 shared

• Jean Tirole

  Toulouse School of Economics

  14 shared

• Levon Barseghyan

  Cornell University

  13 shared

Education

• Ph.d., Economics

  Northwestern University

  2000

• laurea

  Bocconi University

  1995