Alessandro Cigno is Professor of Economics at the University of Florence since 1994. He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in October 1999. He is also a Senior Fellow of RCEA, a Research Associate and former President of CHILD, and a Fellow of CESifo, IZA and GLO. In 1991, he was the President of ESPE.

Professor Cigno graduated in Economics at the University of Catania, specialized in Development Economics at the University of Naples (Portici), and gained his Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics at the University of Birmingham (UK). He has held permanent academic appointments in Italy and the UK, and visiting ones in Argentina, Australia, France, Germany, Guatemala, Japan and the USA. He has also served as a consultant for Cooperazione Italiana, UNICEF and the World Bank on matters relating to child labour and social security.

His research is concerned mainly with household economics and intergenerational relations, in particular with the microeconomics of fertility, the optimal fiscal treatment of families and the design of pension systems. More recently, he has become interested in evolution. His work is published in several books (including Economics of the Family, OUP 1991, The Economics of Child Labour, OUP 2005, and Children and Pensions, MIT Press 2007) and many academic journals (including the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Journal of Public Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Review of Economic Studies and World Bank Economic Review). He was an editor of the Journal of Population Economics.