Alessandra Bonfiglioli

Queen Mary University of London, University of Bergamo

Papers

Total Citations

217

H-Index

About

Alessandra Bonfiglioli is an economist whose research sits at the intersection of international trade, technological change, and labor economics, with a particular focus on the transformative effects of industrial automation on firms and economies. Her most influential work examines how imports of industrial robots shape firm-level outcomes, using rich French firm data spanning nearly two decades to develop a novel empirical strategy for identifying the causal effects of robot adoption. This research, which has accumulated nearly 190 citations across related versions, demonstrates that while demand shocks generate positive firm-level responses, automation introduces more nuanced consequences for employment and productivity. Her work extends beyond the firm level to address broader welfare implications: in her widely discussed paper "Robots, Offshoring, and Welfare" (2022), Bonfiglioli and co-authors show that the welfare effects of automation critically depend on whether robots displace foreign-sourced or domestically-produced tasks — a distinction with major implications for trade and industrial policy. Together, her contributions offer rigorous empirical and theoretical tools for understanding one of the defining economic questions of our era: how automation reshapes work, trade, and prosperity.