Mario is Associate Professor in Development Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Florence. His research interests include clusters of small and medium enterprises and informal activities, child labour and child's capabilities, international aid, rural development, and economies of transition, Chinese and South Asian Development. He is co-author with Franco Volpi of a book on International Aid (FrancoAngeli) and co-editor of four books (Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, FrancoAngeli, Editori riuniti). Papers have been published in several international Journals. He has worked for UNICEF (IRC), for the ILO/UNICEF/World Bank Project Understanding Childrens Work (UCW), for the LInstitute Institute for Industrial Development Policy and for the Istituto Agronomico per lOltremare (IAO) [Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs].
Lucinda is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a quantitative sociologist by background. Her research focuses on children and child poverty both currently and in historical perspective, and on ethnic minorities in the UK, with particular emphasis on poverty, wages, social mobility and identity. She also works on migration and immigrant experience both in the UK and Europe. She is the co-investigator on two, large, Norface-funded migration projects, one on new immigrants in four European countries and one on Turkish families through three generations in Turkey and Europe. She is also co-investigator on Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study, a large, UK-wide, nationally representative panel study with a substantial ethnic minority boost sample for which she leads the ethnicity strand. Before joining LSE, Lucinda was based at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education where she was Director and Principal Investigator of the Millennium Cohort Study, a survey of over 19,000 babies born in 2000-2001 who are followed over time. She retains an association with CLS and is working on two projects that use the Millennium Cohort Study, one on child disability and one on parental separation. Lucinda is an associate of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion [CASE].