We had studied Bresciani Turroni, including his attempts to make an empirical analysis of the demand for Egyptian cotton, and were tackling Value and Capital. I was struck by Franco’s description of the way the consumption function was estimated, in the United States, of course.
Political economy did not end with sophisticated analyses of isoquants, the income effect and the substitution effect: it was a practical science. After graduating and spending some time in the Bank of Italy’s Economic Research Department on a scholarship, I was encouraged by Professor Cutilli to write to a number of American universities in order to specialize in monetary theory and econometrics.