Sofie Cairo, PhD

Sofie Cairo   

Postdoctoral Fellow at Department for Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and at Laboratoray for Innovation Science at Harvard Business School.

2021 PhD in Economics, University of Copenhagen.

Contact: sc.si@cbs.dk  Link to:  CV

Twitter: @CairoSofie, Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/sofie-cairo-6b2025b 

Research fields  

Methods:  Applied microeconometrics, behavioral and experimental methods.

Data : Survey, experimental, bibliometrics, administrative registers.

Programs: R, Stata, SAS, Matlab


Intro

I am a postdoctoral fellow contemporaneously engaged in research on health shocks and the direction of science at Harvard Business School (w/ Myers, Kongsted and Koning), and designing a large field experiment  with Danish firms to investigate gender gaps in promotions (w/Garofalo and Tartari). 

Before spending time in Boston, I worked for Valentina Tartari at CBS to investigate motherhood penalties on female scientists in STEM relative to male peers. Not surprisingly, the average annual penalty is large at 25 percentage points as long as children are below school age. Mitigating factors are academic partners,  access to informal help and gender equal household norms, while lack of flexibility at work, e.g. fields that require laboratory presence, exacerbate motherhood penalties 

My 2021 PhD dissertation in Economics from University of Copenhagen focused on UI and welfare benefit recipients. My team and I collaborated with the Ministry of Employment to conduct two large online field experiments.  The results are published in one paper at JPube and an IZA WP (R&R at JEEA).

My last PhD paper links individual fertility preferences of young women to their life-time career outcomes. I find that desiring a large family is associated with annual wage losses of 8% relative to  desiring a smaller family of two children or less. Wage losses incurred after birth reflect selection into self-employment.