Assistant Professor of Economics
Department of Social and Political Sciences
Bocconi University
germain.gauthier@unibocconi.it
curriculum vitae
About Me
I am an economist working at the intersection of political economy, public economics, and econometrics. In my applied work, I study the societal consequences of digital technologies (e.g., social media, large language models). I am particularly interested in the emergence and amplification of bias in algorithmic systems and how these shape economic and political outcomes. I have also studied the impact of social media on protests, political attitudes, and gender norms. In my methods work, I develop models to extract structured information from unstructured data (e.g., texts, images, videos). My recent focus has been on estimating latent factor models (e.g., ideology, topics) using deep neural networks.
I am affiliated with CESifo, DONDENA and IGIER research centers. I am also involved in various initiatives at Bocconi, including the DONDENA AI and Society Initiative (DAISI), the AXA Gender Lab, and the Monitoring Democracy Initiative (MoDe).
Recent News
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14/09/2026: I gave a talk to Bocconi PhD students on how I use AI coding agents. See the slides here.
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03/09/2026: I gave a talk at APSA on recent ongoing work on whether voters can rely electoral campaign platforms to infer what politicians will say and do once in office. See the slides here.
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01/09/2026: I gave a short lecture on “Causal inference with unstructured data” for the Zurich Summer School in AI and Applied Economics.
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21/05/2026: I will be a guest researcher at CESifo between the 22 of June and the 3rd of July. Send me an email if you would like to meet with me!
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01/04/2026: I am visiting the Paris School of Economics for a couple of weeks, where I will present the new version of my work on the Me Too movement. New draft coming soon.
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21/02/2026: Our paper The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm is out in Nature! Four years in the making. Check it out!
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17/01/2026: Just visited USI Lugano for a week, teaching a PhD level course on Text as Data (joint with Philine Widmer). Check out the slides and notebooks in my teaching section if interested.