Giovanni Favero

Giovanni Favero is Full Professor in Economic History in the Department of Management of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He teaches Economic History in different first- and second-level degrees and Business History in the PhD in Management at Ca' Foscari.He graduated in History at Ca' Foscari (1995) and received a PhD in Urban and Rural History at the University of Perugia (1999). He was visiting researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1998) and at the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (1999) in Paris, at the University of California at Irvine, School of Social Sciences (2000), at Aston Business School (2016), and wt Université Paris 1 Sorbonne (2016). He is the Thomas K. McCraw Fellow in US business history at Harvard Business School for the academic year 2018/19.His research interests stretch from the history of statistics (subject of the PhD dissertation, then published as Le misure del Regno: Direzione di statistica e municipi nell'Italia liberale, Padua, Il Poligrafo, 2001) to business history and urban history. The critical edition of the correspondence between the director of the Italian statistical bureau in the last quarter of the 19th century and the main industrialist of the time (Lo statistico e l'industriale: carteggio tra Luigi Bodio e Alessandro Rossi, 1869-1897, Rome, Istat, 1999) was the occasion to shift the focus on business history, dealing with the relationship between the crisis of big business and the development of industrial districts (Lo smalto e la ruggine: domande, documenti, testimonianze sulle Smalterie di Bassano, Castelfranco Veneto 2002) and then with the development of a multinational network firm (Benetton: I colori del successo, Milan 2005). An interest for urban history dates back to the PhD, and is at the origin of a study on the connection between local policy and economic development in a small Italian city (Amministrare lo sviluppo: Bassano del Grappa, 1945-1980, Bassano 2007). With Francesca Trivellato he published a study on the demographic history of the Venetian ghetto (in the journal Zakhor, 2004).The connection between statistics and business management in modern times is now his main field of interest. He edited a special issue of the journal Quaderni Storici, 134.2 (2010) on Statistical Sources for the Economic History of Unified Italy, and published an article on Business Attitudes towards Statistical Investigation in Enterprise