Emanuele Colonnelli
Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship, Chicago Booth
Emanuele Colonnelli is a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth. He serves as board member and cochair of the Finance Sector at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and leads the Finance and Entrepreneurship Theme at the CEPR-FCDO’s PEDL initiative. He is the codirector of Becker Friedman Institute (BFI) LATAM, a research associate at the NBER, and a research affiliate at CEPR, BREAD, and J-PAL. He is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, such as the 2023 Carlo Alberto Medal, a biennial prize given to the best Italian economist under 40.
Colonnelli’s research focuses on the intersection between finance, development, and political economy, with a special interest in high-growth entrepreneurship and the interaction between governments, firms, and investors. Specific interests include a range of topics such as venture capital and private equity, corporate governance, corruption, ESG and impact investing, public procurement, and corporate bankruptcy. He has research and work experience in several emerging economies, including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, Myanmar, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, and Vietnam and regularly conducts world-wide surveys and field experiments with entrepreneurs, firms, and investors. His research has been published in various top academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics.
Colonnelli joined Booth in 2018 as an assistant professor of finance, and from 2022 he was associate professor of finance and MV advisors faculty fellow. He was also a visiting associate professor of business administration in the entrepreneurial management unit at Harvard Business School, where he taught the MBA elective on entrepreneurial finance. At Booth, he developed and teaches the first MBA class focused on venture capital and private equity in emerging markets.
Colonnelli holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, an MSc in economics from Bocconi University, a BSc in economics from the University of Siena, and he spent an academic year visiting Pembroke College, Oxford University.