Organization
Libera Università di Bolzano (UNIBZ), is located at the crossroads between the Italian and the German cultural and economic worlds, and multilingualism and internationality are its main characteristics. The five faculties (Computer Science; Economics and Management; Education; Design and Art; Science and Technology) with a high number of lecturers (31%) and students (14% – national average: 3.5%) from abroad deal with subjects connected to economics, the natural sciences, technology, computer science, design and the social and educational worlds. Teaching and research at UNIBZ are based on high quality standards and the faculties are part of international networks. There are approx. 120 tenured professors and researchers, 110 RTD (senior researchers on contract), 100 post-docs and 450 contract lecturers. UNIBZ offers exchange programmes with about 140 universities. 71.9% of graduates are in employed work within one year after graduation. In the 2017 World’s Best Small Universities Ranking (Times Higher Education), UNIBZ is ranked among the best 10 small universities worldwide. In the 2018 Times Higher Education World University rankings UNIBZ ranked in the band of 301-350 out of 1,102 institutions worldwide. On a national level, in 2018 UNIBZ got the top placement in the ranking for small non-state universities with the highest score of all Italian universities. UNIBZ will participate in this project through its Faculty of Economics and Management. More than 1,100 students are enrolled in the Faculty of Economics and Management (out of 4,050 students at the university).
The Faculty of Economics and Management was founded in 1998 and its students and faculty members study and work in three languages: German, Italian and English. Through academic excellence in research and teaching, the Faculty contributes to the development of the South-Tyrolean economy while being solidly connected to international scientific networks. The quality of its multidisciplinary and multilingual study programmes are recognized both in Italy (3rd in the 2013 ranking of La Repubblica) and in Germany (top mark in the CHE Die Zeit ranking for internationalisation). The undergraduate and graduate programs prepare students to participate actively and efficiently in tomorrow’s regional and global economic world. They learn to find innovative solutions to economic and business problems through a multi-faceted analysis of each new situation they are confronted with. The Faculty has also been recognized as one of the best in Italy for its research (4th in Economics, 2nd in Law and Political Science according to ANVUR). The research developed by the faculty members reflects this multi-faceted approach, as specialists of Economics, Law, Management, Finance, Politics and Philosophy combine their efforts in several multidisciplinary projects. The results of most of these projects are published in international journals and presented at prestigious international scientific conferences.
Expertise & People
Prof. A. Weissensteiner will be the key person responsible for the tasks to be contributed by the UNIBZ. He has been active for around 13 years now in the areas of life-cycle financial planning, long-term asset allocation, stochastic optimization, and financial scenario generation. In these areas, he has published in top-rated journals in the areas of finance and economics. His background is in finance and quantitative methods, in particular, long-term asset allocation, financial optimization, and financial scenario generation, with applications to pension finance.
Aicha Kharazi is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Her main research interests are in macroeconomics, investigating credit market frictions in business cycles, the role of collateral and wealth inequality. Her current work is on the interaction between interest rates and saving on an aging population economy. Aicha received her PhD in economics and finance at University of Rome Tor Vergata.