Alberto Alesina is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His primary fields of interest are political economy, monetary and fiscal policy, and macroeconomics, and his current research topics include fiscal policy, currency unions, size of countries, and redistributive policies. Since 1987 over seventy of his influential papers have been published in leading academic journals, and he has also co-authored or edited nine books including, with Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (Oxford University Press, 2004) and, with Enrico Spolaore, The Size of Nations (MIT Press, 2003).