Paola Valbonesi is Full Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Department of Economics and Management “Marco Fanno” at the University of Padua. She earned her degree in Political Science from the University of Padua and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. She is Director of the Italian Observatory on Energy Poverty (OIPE), an informal network of researchers and experts on the subject. She has been a part-time Leading Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU-HSE) in Moscow and Perm, and has worked as a consultant for institutions such as the World Bank and the Joint Research Centre (DG-JRC) of the European Union. Her research spans the fields of industrial economics and public economics. Her work mainly focuses on the design of efficient rules and economic incentives, particularly in areas where public intervention is crucial, such as public procurement, state aid, regulation of the energy sector, and utilities more broadly. She also studies the design of support mechanisms for vulnerable consumers in energy markets. Her publications have appeared in international journals including Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of Public Economics (2); Journal of Health Economics; American Economic Journal: Microeconomics; The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization; Experimental Economics; Energy Policy (2); The Energy Journal.