The Gallatin Fellowship was established by the Feris Foundation of America in 1976 in honour of Albert Gallatin, a Geneva native and US statesman, in order to support transatlantic research — allowing advanced doctoral students from the Geneva Graduate Institute to complete their studies at prestigious universities in the United States and allowing US students to complete their studies at the Institute.
This year, one of Gallatin Fellowships was awarded to Giovanni Borraccia, a PhD researcher in Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Three Essays in Macroeconomics: Information Frictions, Expectations and Monetary Policy Transmission”, examines how economic agents form inflation expectations and the implications for monetary policy and macroeconomic stability. Before starting his PhD he worked as a research analyst at the International Monetary Fund's European Department, and previously at the World Bank and the European Central Bank. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BSc from University College London.
Thanks to the Gallatin, Giovanni Borraccia spent February to June of 2026 at the University of California, Berkeley, which gave him the chance to work closely with an authority in the field, Professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko, on one of his PhD chapters. His time in Berkeley also allowed him to have access to the Berkeley economics faculty and seminar series, and to establish valuable collaborations with researchers working in the same field both from UC Berkeley and visiting from other top institutions.
While at Berkeley, Giovanni Borraccia developed a job market paper, "Stock Ownership and Inflation Expectations: Evidence from the 2021–2025 Inflation Surge." Using household survey microdata spanning the recent inflation surge, he documented that stockholders' one-year-ahead inflation expectations tracked realised inflation significantly more closely than non-stockholders' did. Explaining this research, he said, “I show the gap is best explained by a rational-inattention channel — equity ownership raises the return to monitoring macroeconomic conditions, which lowers the effective cost of acquiring an accurate experienced inflation signal — rather than by differences in financial sophistication between the two groups. I formalise this mechanism in a two-signal rational-inattention model and test its predictions in the data. Being at Berkeley for the full arc of the project gave me sustained exposure to a research community working on closely related questions, and I returned to Geneva with a paper now at the centerpiece of my dissertation.”
I look back on this fellowship with real appreciation. The exposure to such a vibrant community of researchers, and the exchanges that came with it truly enriched me and shaped my work in ways I am still drawing on. I am thankful to the Feris Foundation and to the Graduate Institute for making it possible.
– Giovanni Borraccia
