Paola Sapienza


Paola Sapienza is an economist and the Professor Donald C. Clark/HSBC Chair in Consumer Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
She is a research associate at the NBER and CEPR. Her fields of interest include financial economics and political economy.

Education and career

She obtained her MA and PhD from Harvard University after a Bachelor in Economics from Bocconi University. In 1998, she joined the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Finance. She got promoted to associate professor in 2006 and to full professor in 2009.

Research

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 and in her work on religion and economic attitudes. 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. Her paper "Trusting the Stock Market" has been awarded the Distinguished Paper Smith Breeden Prize at the American Financial Association’s annual meeting in January 2010. Her work have been cited more than 24000 times. She has published papers in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Finance.
Her most cited paper, with Luigi Guiso and Luigi Zingales, explores the role of culture in economics opening new perspectives for cultural economics. In her paper "Culture, Math, and Gender" she shows that girls' academic achievements are linked to societal cultural norms, debunking the genetic explanation for different math scores between boys and girls. In subsequent research, she has shown that stereotypes about women abilities may affect hiring and promotion of women in STEM related fields. 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.
Her research has been quoted in the Financial Times, Washington Post, Quartz, NPR, Forbes, The Economist, Science magazine, El Pais, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal.

Awards and recognition

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. She was elected on the board of directors of the American Finance Association from 2012 to 2014. She is the 371 most quoted economist in the world and the 21st most influential woman in economics. She was included in the Thompson Reuters List of Most Influential Minds in 2014, 2015 and Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2016, and 2018.