Professor Citera Says Hello

Hello reader! My name is Emanuele Citera -I go as Manny- and I’m an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department. I joined St. Lawrence University in the Fall of 2022 as a tenure-track faculty for the new finance major. Since then, I have been teaching Corporate Finance I and II, History of Financial Crises, and Introduction to Finance.  

I’m originally from Rimini, a town by the northern Adriatic coast of Italy. It’s a well-known place for tourists, who come there to enjoy the beach and the nightlife over the summer. A place to check out if you’re planning a trip to Italy. Make sure you try our typical dish, “piadina,”which is a great competitor of tortillas!  

I was born in Rimini back in February 1990, and I lived there until I was twenty-four years old. I studied business economics at the University of Bologna, where I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. It took me almost five years to figure out that I wasn’t really into accounting, marketing, law and all that. Nothing against this; it is just not my thing! But interestingly enough, I ended up teaching some of this stuff in my courses.  

Since high school, I developed a strong interest in history and philosophy. Now, you may ask yourself, why on earth would you go for a business major if you like theoretical subjects? Well, my father runs a small accountant company back home, which I thought I could take over once I completed my studies. But I felt that would hardly happen. I’m not done with this sort of job. However, feeling a bit lost, as most undergrads do at the beginning of their study, I thought a business degree would be a safe move.  

I turned to economics and later finance with my master’s thesis on the history of economic thought. The topic was a comparison between the concepts of risk, uncertainty, and probability between two economists from the early twentieth century: Frank H. Knight and John Maynard Keynes. This is rather unusual for a business major, but it made me understand where my academic interests lay. Right after I graduated, in December 2014, I worked for six months as a tax consultant at Ernst and Young in Bologna, and that threw me off of the corporate sector! Then, I went back to study and got another master’s in Economics and Complexity at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and that’s when I finally decided to devote myself to academia.  

In 2017, I moved to the U.S. to take my PhD in economics at The New School for Social Research in New York City. The New School has been crucial in determining my approach to economics and finance. The critical intellectual environment it attracts, on the one hand, and the pluralistic education it promotes, on the other, opened new frontiers and a different of thinking about social issues. In this respect, I am, and will always be, grateful to my advisors, Duncan Foley and Mark Setterfield. The most valuable thing they taught me, in addition to the technical knowledge necessary to do research, is how to be intellectually humble and open to criticism. This is the true essence of critical thinking and academia. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a common trait of several academics. This is really sad…  

In terms of my research, it has two dimensions. One is more historical and institutional, and the other one is more analytical and methodological -you can think of them as qualitative vs. Quantitative- I apply them mostly to study monetary and financial economics, as well as the history of economic thought.  

As per the qualitative aspect of my research, I’m interested in how social conventions and financial institutions shape aggregate outcomes and generate booms and busts in the economy.   

Regarding my quantitative approach, I use Econophysics and the theory of complex systems to study the statistical regularities observed in financial markets. For example, my doctoral dissertation develops a model to recover the cross-sectional distributions of the US stock market over the last four decades and to infer investors’ behavior and the degree of informational efficiency of this market.  

Ok, I guess it’s time to wrap this up. One important thing I haven’t mentioned at all is that I split my life in two: half academics and half musician. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 9 years old, and before that, I played other instruments such as piano and flute. Music is an important part of my life, and I try to make as much time as possible for it. I’ve played in rock, blues, acoustic and jazz bands.1  

In late 2021, I released an instrumental song I wrote back in time. It is called “10 Years (Simply Me)”, because I wrote it back in 2011. It sat there for about 10 years until I finally recorded it. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNR8V8ZXb_M  

I hope you enjoyed this informal autobiography of mine. As a relatively new member of the SLU community, I’ve been impressed at how welcoming and vivid it is. I’m grateful to be part of it and hope to contribute to keep it as such. I’d like to end with this quote from Albert Einstein: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”  

I wish you all to keep your dreams alive, to let imagination take over, and to keep up the fight for what you’re searching for.  

Best of luck with your semester!  

Emanuele