Oriana Bandiera, FBA is an Italian economist and academic, specialising in development economics. She has been Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics since 2009. She is currently the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Director of the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines since 2012, Director of State Capabilities at the International Growth Centre, and Co-Director of the Development Research Program at the .
Bandiera's research interests revolve around the impact of monetary incentives and social relationships on individual behaviour. In terms of research output, Bandiera ranks among the top 2% of economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc. Key results of her research include the following:
The productivity of the average worker is at least 50% higher under piece rates than under relative incentives, as workers partially internalize the negative social externality of their effort under relative incentives - though only when they can monitor and be monitored -, but don't do so under piece rates. Moreover, the introduction of managerial performance pay is found to result in an increase in both the mean and dispersion of worker productivity, mainly due to managers targeting their efforts toward high ability workers and selecting out the least able workers. By contrast, when managers are paid piece rates, they tend to concentrate on workers with whom they are socially connected irrespective of their ability; overall, even though social connections increase the performance of connected workers, favouritism towards well-connected workers is found to be detrimental to the firm's overall performance. Moreover, workers who have at least one friend who is more able than themselves are willing to increase their effort and hence productivity by 10%, which suggests that firms can exploit social incentives as an alternative to monetary incentives to motivate workers. Finally, strengthening team incentives, either through rankings or tournaments, is found to make workers more likely to form teams with others of similar ability instead of with their friends, with rank incentives decreasing average productivity by 14% and tournament incentives increasing it by 24%.
The relationship between the decision of farmers in Mozambique to adopt a new crop and the adoption choices of their network of family and friends is inverse-U shaped, mitigated by the farmers' own information, and uncorrelated among individuals of different religions.
Financial liberalization in Chile, Ghana, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey and Zimbabwe failed to increase saving and - especially concerning policies aimed at relaxing liquidity constraints - may have depressed savings.
The Sicilian Mafia originated in landowners attempts to protect their land against predatory attacks at a time of widespread banditry, even as doing so deflected thieves on others' properties.
Highly talented and risk-tolerant managers tend to match with firms that value these characteristics most; a wide array of empirical regularities can be accounted for by a simple model where incentives and matches are endogenously determined.
The effect size of university class sizes is only negative and significant for the smallest and largest ranges of class sizes, with top-scoring students most affected by changes in class size.
Four years after an intervention in Uganda that provided adolescent girls with both vocational training and information on sex, reproduction and marriage, girls in treated communities are 48% more likely to engage in income generating activities, 34% less likely to be pregnant, and 62% less likely to be married or cohabiting with a partner.
As shown in an RCT in Bangladesh, the poor are able to take on the work activities of the non-poor but face barriers to doing so, and, one-off interventions that remove these barriers - e.g. by enabling poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing, lead to sustainable poverty reduction.
Providing non-financial rewards to agents recruited by a public health organization to promote HIV prevention and sell condoms in Lusaka was more effective than either financial rewards or volunteering, with the effect of both rewards complementing agents' pro-social motivations and both rewards' effectiveness increasing in their relative value.
Some public bodies in Italy pay systematically more than others for equivalent goods, differences are associated with governance structure, and only 17% of the variation in prices is due to variation in waste that entails utility for the public decision maker.
Personal life
Bandiera is married. She has one son and one daughter. She speaks Italian, English, and Spanish.
