University of Commerce Luigi Bocconi

This is an intensive intermediate Italian language course designed for students with a minimum of 3 quarters/2 semesters of previous Italian language (the equivalent of Italian 1B). Grammar is applied through exercises, games, communicative activities, written texts and oral monologues, role play and use of various media. Students express basic and more complex needs which enable them to communicate regarding a variety of topics. Students read texts and write descriptive and narrative texts. Grammar topics covered include: regular and irregular verbs in present, past, past perfect, imperfect, future simple and past and conditional tenses and learning to recognize the remote past tense; adjectives and indefinite pronouns; direct and indirect pronouns; simple and complex prepositions. Student performance is evaluated based on quizzes and a final exam. Texts include a reader provided by Bocconi.

The course addresses the main approaches to the measurement of inequality and poverty, their main trends at the global level, and their fundamental determinants. For each topic the course discusses the relevant theoretical framework, the main measurement issues, and the available empirical evidence. The course discusses topics including trends in inequality and poverty including inequality, the financial crisis, and the great recession, and global trends in inequality and poverty.; measurement tools including the need for criteria, the transfer principle and other criteria for evaluating inequality measures, income distribution functions (Pareto, Normal, and Log-normal), partial ordering methods (stochastic dominance and the Lorenz Curve), complete ordering methods (the Gini index), and measuring inequality using STATA; topics in inequality including the top 1%: capital in the 21st century, the remaining 99% (skills, education, job polarization, robots, trade, and the rise of earnings inequality), migration and inequality, intergenerational inequality (where is the Land of Opportunity?); measurement of intergenerational income elasticity and rank-rank regressions, the Great Gatsby curve, and optimal taxation; and topics in poverty including poverty measures, anti-poverty policies (earned income tax credit and food stamps), and Universal Basic Income in  advanced Countries. The course strongly recommends students have a background in microeconomics, mathematics, and statistics, including basic concepts such as utility functions, derivatives, integrals, probability distribution functions, expected values, mean, variance, and other basic quantitative concepts.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of what blockchain is and how it works. It explores the transition from the accounting traditional ledger to a distributed one and describes how transactions occur under this new paradigm. Insights on how blockchain affect the future of industry and organizations also are covered. The course also covers aspects related to automation of assurance procedures and provides some concepts to develop a blockchain system. Finally, an introduction to the concept of the digitalization of assets and related contract automation which leads to Smart Contracts are discussed. The mission of this course is to introduce concepts and tools to understand the potential of blockchain technology in real world applications.