About

I'm Massimo. I'm from Miami, and I feel most like myself by the ocean, out in nature, or running around a tennis court or soccer field.

I studied economics at Vanderbilt with minors in computer science and Mediterranean studies. Before that I spent a few years doing astrophysics research at the University of Miami, which mostly meant sitting with messy datasets until they gave something up. Three of them turned into published papers. After Vanderbilt I worked at TD Bank, writing the business and technical requirements for two internal AI systems.

For a while my attention was on digital power. In a class with Professor John Conley I dug into the technical side: how platforms are built, how they monetize attention, how networks are structured, and how access can be limited or manipulated. Studying abroad, a course with Dr. Massimo Motta showed me how dominant companies use loopholes, lobbying, and market design to block out competitors and entrench their power. Most of what looked like technology turned out to be rules.

I've been traveling since I was a kid. My family's Italian, so I was in and out of other countries before I had any framework for what I was seeing. It took years to notice I was getting annoyed in a specific way. Not at any one place, at a pattern. Some cities move you around effortlessly and you never think about why. Others waste your time in ways that feel almost deliberate, and the difference is rarely about money or beauty. The pattern bothered me before I could explain it. Eventually I realized I was looking at infrastructure, and that infrastructure is economics you can walk through. Reading Alain Bertaud's Order Without Design gave me the vocabulary for the rest of it: cities aren't designed so much as shaped by the constraints they're built under. That's urban economics. It's what I'm studying, and what I want to build a career on.

I'm finishing a master's in economics at Columbia, focused on urban economics and economic development. I want to work on how cities get built and financed: the analysis behind large projects, and eventually the projects themselves. Miami is where I'd like that to land.

This site is where I think out loud. Mostly about cities, housing, and the economics underneath both. Sometimes about markets and technology, which is where I started and which keeps turning out to be the same set of questions in a different costume. If any of it is useful to you, or wrong, I'm easy to find.