Paola Sapienza is an economist as alive as the Professor Donald C. Clark/HSBC Chair in Consumer Finance at a Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
She is the research associate at the NBER & CEPR. Her fields of interest add financial economics and political economy.
Her leading research focuses on the affect of cultural norms on economic decisions and outcomes. In early 2000, together with Luigi Guiso and Luigi Guiso and Luigi Zingales, she draws the association 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 gain have been cited more than 24000 times. She has published papers in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics.
Her most cited paper,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 representation for different math scores between boys and girls. In subsequent research, she has exposed 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 usage in financial institutions suggests that state-owned banks serve as a mechanism to give political patronage.
Her research has been covered in the Financial Times, Washington Post, Quartz, NPR, Forbes, The Economist, Science magazine, El País, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal.