Valentina Corradi’s path into economics began with books rather than numbers. As a student in Italy, she was drawn to history and the ways in which economics shaped societies. “I was more interested in inequality and income distribution, in the role economics played alongside sociology and history,” she says. “At the beginning, I was reading more than measuring.”
That changed during her undergraduate degree in Milan, when skilled professors in mathematics, statistics, and econometrics introduced her to the technical side of the discipline. “I realised I wanted to measure things,” she says. “The tools of economics allowed me to do that.” The combination of a social conscience and a taste for quantitative rigour set the course for her career.
Her PhD, also undertaken in Italy, provided the chance to spend a year at MIT, an experience that reoriented her focus. “That year completely changed my interests,” Corradi recalls. “I moved from applied work to econometric theory. I wanted to do proofs and understand the mathematics beneath the models.”
From there, Corradi embarked on a second PhD in Economics at the University of California, San Diego, describing it as “five wonderful years” thanks to the faculty, colleagues and location. A position at the University of Pennsylvania followed, before she moved to London. “I knew I would not get tenure in the US, so when the opportunity came, I moved to the UK — and stayed for 27 years.”
While holding posts at Queen Mary University of London, University of Exeter, University of Warwick, and University of Surrey, her research interests sharpened around risk, particularly the kinds of shocks that reverberate through economies. “I study tail risk and extreme events,” she says. “What is the probability that a bank suffers a very large loss, or that inflation surges, or that growth suddenly collapses?”
Increasingly, she has extended this work into environmental and extinction risks.
The idea that companies could disappear because of environmental shocks is both pressing and fascinating. I want to apply my tools to compare multiple risks.
In 2024 she moved again, this time joining NYU Abu Dhabi as Professor of Economics, attracted by the chance to work in a new environment and with a more diverse academic community. “It is a small campus but full of people from very different backgrounds,” she says. “That creates energy and opportunities to exchange ideas.”
Artificial intelligence is another area that she believes economics must now confront. She sees it reshaping labour markets as well as offering new tools for research. “Machines are no longer just tools — they are part of the workforce,” she says. With automation and AI competing alongside human labour, questions of taxation and policy come to the fore.
How do we adjust work in the presence of artificial intelligence? Should we also tax machines? These are important debates.
At the same time, she recognises the opportunities AI brings. “Machine learning gives economists powerful new ways to handle large datasets and account for confounding factors,” she notes. As an example, she points to policies such as free school meals, where AI methods can help disentangle multiple confounding effects. “These tools allow us to identify policy impacts more precisely.”
Her view in the classroom is pragmatic but cautious. “If students use ChatGPT to gather information, that is fine,” she says. “If they use it to avoid thinking, that is problematic.” For her own work, she prefers to write by hand, believing it sharpens her thinking.
From financial crises to environmental shocks, from taxation in the age of automation to the teaching of undergraduates, Corradi’s career has been defined by a determination to bring clarity to uncertainty. Across Italy, the United States, Britain, and now the Gulf, she has focused on the risks at the margins — those rare but transformative events that can shape societies for decades to come.
