Paola Sapienza is an American and Italian economist. She is the J.P. Conte Family Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution . She is also a research associate at the NBER [1] and CEPR. [2] Her fields of interest include financial economics, cultural economics, and political economy.
Sapienza received a bachelor's degree in economics from Bocconi University in Milan. In 1998 she earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University with the completion of her thesis, titled Three essays in Banking, under the supervision of Andrei Shleifer and Jeremy Stein. In the same year she joined the faculty of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She has been named Hoover Senior Fellow in 2024.
Her main research focuses on the impact of cultural norms on economic decisions and outcomes. In early 2000, together with Luigi Guiso and Luigi Zingales she was among the first economists exploring cultural economics in her work on social capital and financial development [3] and in her work on religion and economic attitudes. [4] In her most influential work, she examines the interactions between trust, social capital, and civic capital. She applied these concepts to financial development, financial institutions, behavioral economics and political economy. Her research is influential in finance where, with Luigi Guiso and Luigi Zingales, she draws the connection between trust and finance. [5] Her most cited paper, [6] with Luigi Guiso and Luigi Zingales, explores the role of culture in economics opening new perspectives for cultural economics. [7] In her paper "Culture, Math, and Gender" [8] she shows that girls' academic achievements are linked to societal cultural norms, debunking the genetic explanation for different math scores between boys and girls. [9] In subsequent research, she has shown that stereotypes about women abilities may affect hiring and promotion of women in STEM related fields. [10] In the field of the political economy of finance, her paper on the role of government ownership in financial institutions suggests that state-owned banks serve as a mechanism to supply political patronage. [11] In her most recent series of papers, she expanded on her earlier work "Culture, Math, and Gender" and explored whether vertical transmission of cultural attitudes may explain different educational attainments. [12]
Her research on education has contributes to understanding how cultural transmission affects educational outcomes. [13] In a series of papers with Paola Giuliano and various collaborators, she explores how vertical and horizontal cultural transmission of preferences shapes academic performance. This research stream connects to their earlier work on cultural economics. Their work with immigrant students in Florida public schools demonstrates how cultural attitudes (specifically long term orientation) transmitted from parents to children influences educational achievement, showing that students from cultures emphasizing delayed gratification perform better academically. [14] Their subsequent work on immigrant peer effects reveals that exposure to immigrant students positively impacts US-born students' academic performance, especially benefiting Black and low socioeconomic status students. [15] These findings contribute to the broader understanding of how cultural values and beliefs transmitted through families and peer groups shape educational outcomes, challenging previous negative assumptions about immigrant effects on native students' performance.
Her paper "Trusting the Stock Market" [16] has been awarded the Distinguished Paper Smith Breeden Prize at the American Financial Association's annual meeting in January 2010. [17] Her work have been cited more than 33000 times. [18] She has published papers in the American Economic Review, [19] the Quarterly Journal of Economics, [20] [21] Science, [8] the Journal of Finance, [22] [16] [23] the Review of Financial Studies, [24] [25] the Journal of Financial Economics. [11] [26] [27] Her research has been quoted in the Financial Times, [28] Washington Post, [29] Quartz, [30] NPR, [31] Forbes, [32] The Economist, [33] [34] [35] Science magazine, [36] El País, [37] The Telegraph, [38] The New York Times, [39] Bloomberg, [40] The Wall Street Journal. [41]
She was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance from 2012 to 2015, an Associate Editor at Management of Science from 2009 to 2013 and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Economic Perspectives from 2005 to 2008. [44] She was elected on the board of directors of the American Finance Association from 2012 to 2014. [45] She is among the top 5% most quoted economist in the world [46] and among the top 20 most influential female economists. [47] She was included in the Thomson Reuters List of Most Influential Minds in 2014, [48] 2015 [49] and Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2016, and 2018. [50]
Cultural bias is the interpretation and judgment of phenomena by the standards of one's own culture. It is sometimes considered a problem central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Some practitioners of these fields have attempted to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate cultural bias.
The American Finance Association (AFA) is an academic organization whose focus is the study and promotion of knowledge of financial economics. It was formed in 1939. Its main publication, the Journal of Finance, was first published in 1946.
Cultural economics is the branch of economics that studies the relation of culture to economic outcomes. Here, 'culture' is defined by shared beliefs and preferences of respective groups. Programmatic issues include whether and how much culture matters as to economic outcomes and what its relation is to institutions. As a growing field in behavioral economics, the role of culture in economic behavior is increasingly being demonstrated to cause significant differentials in decision-making and the management and valuation of assets.
James Michael "Jim" Poterba, FBA is an American economist who is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and current National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) president and chief executive officer.
David Hirshleifer is an American economist who is currently the David G. Kirby Professor of Behavior Economics at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. From 2006-2021 he was a Distinguished Professor of Finance and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also held the Merage Chair in Business Growth. From 2018 to 2019, he served as President of the American Finance Association, and is an associate at the NBER. Previously, he was a professor at UCLA, the University of Michigan, and Ohio State University. His research is mostly related to behavioral finance and informational cascades. In 2007, he was listed as one of the 100 most-cited economists in the world by Web of Science. On Google Scholar, he has more than 60,000 citations.
Markus Konrad Brunnermeier is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Luigi Zingales is an Italian academic who is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003) is a study of "relationship capitalism". In A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (2012), Zingales "suggests that channeling populist anger can reinvigorate the power of competition and reverse the movement toward a 'crony system'."
Ulrike M. Malmendier is a German economist who is currently a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. In 2013, she was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association.
Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan is an economist and the Schreiber Family Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a co-editor of the Journal of International Economics, on the board of editors of the American Economic Review, an associate editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics. She is a research fellow at the NBER and CEPR.
Marianne Baxter is a professor of economics at Boston University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago and a bachelor from the University of Rochester. She is a research associate at the NBER. She is the 412th most cited economist in the world according to IDEAS.
Linda S. Goldberg is an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is currently Senior Vice President in the Research Policy Leadership division. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Economics from Queens College of the City University of New York.
Sydney C. Ludvigson is an American economist and the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Economics at New York University. Since 2017, she serves as chair of NYU's economics department.
Paola Giuliano is an economist and currently the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Raquel Fernández is an economist and currently the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Economics at New York University. She is also a fellow of the Econometric Society.
Mariassunta Giannetti is an economist and a professor of finance at the Stockholm School of Economics. She won the Assar Lindbeck Medal in 2013.
Mara Faccio is an economist and currently the Duke Realty Chair in Finance and Professor of Finance at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.
Manju Puri is an economist who currently works as the J. B. Fuqua Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Motohiro Yogo is a Japanese American economist and a professor of economics at Princeton University. His research is on asset pricing, insurance, and household finance.
Rüdiger Fahlenbrach is a German economist specialised in finance. He is a professor of finance at EPFL and holds the Swiss Finance Institute Senior Research Chair.
Jun Pan is the SAIF Chair Professor of Finance at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is an editor at the Review of Finance and an associate editor at the Journal of Finance.
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