Alexia Delfino - Research papers

Commerce requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group can expropriate another due to differences in power. This can lead the weaker group to self-segregate into industries and activities; female-led businesses, for example, tend to be small and clustered in a small number of industries where collaborators are also female. We present a model which relates this economic segregation to rule of law, and predicts that female trust depends on the protective preferences of adjudicators in weak rule of law environments. We then show that effective dispute resolution in Lusaka, Zambia, especially as administered by "market chiefs," enables trusting behavior by female entrepreneurs, both in cross-section correlations and in two artefactual field experiments. Such trust generates increased economic returns. We find considerable heterogeneity across market chiefs in their preferences for protecting more vulnerable women.

Learning to See the World’s Opportunities: Memory, Mental Experiencing and the Economic Lives of the Vulnerable

with N. Ashraf (LSE), G. Bryan (LSE), E. Holmes (Uppsala), L. Iacovone (WB), C. Meyer (Oxford) and A. Pople (WB)

Revise and resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy

Coverage: BBC Ideas, Bocconi Video

CEPR Discussion Paper DP19879

The capacity to imagine possibilities beyond one’s experience is fundamental to economic life. This ability draws on memory and becomes distorted by experiencing trauma. To what extent does this distortion influence how new experiences are interpreted, and can it be repaired? In this paper, we answer these questions in two RCTs where we introduce and evaluate Guided Mental Experiencing (GME), a scalable intervention that trains individuals to construct vivid, causally structured simulations of future success and is designed to repair the cognitive impacts of trauma. In a sample of refugees in Ethiopia, consistent with the repair hypothesis, GME alone improves simulation quality, labor supply, income, and food security. In a sample of vulnerable would be entrepreneurs in Colombia, we test both hypotheses. Traditional business training harms trauma-exposed participants—consistent with the idea that history shapes how people respond to new interventions. Adding GME reverses these effects—consistent with cognitive repair. We contribute evidence that trauma-induced constraints are malleable, introduce new tools to measure simulation, and provide large-scale evidence on the behavioral and economic effects of GME.

Funding: IPA P&R Exploratory Grant, IGA-Rockefeller Research and Impact Fund, J-PAL PPE, IPA P&R, J-PAL GEA

Value Dissonance at Work

with M. Espinosa (Bocconi)

Coverage: VoxTalks (CEPR), ViaSarfatti25, The Visible Hand Podcast

CEPR Discussion Paper DP19929

Organizations often require employees to collaborate with others who may see the world differently, yet we know little about how misalignment in personal values affects performance within firms. Using survey and administrative data from a world-leading bank, we show that employees whose values diverge from those of their manager per- form worse. This effect is not explained by demographic diversity or misalignment with organizational values. The productivity loss from moving from the least to the most misaligned worker is nearly four times larger than that associated with having a man- ager of a different gender. In contrast, value differences with teammates do not generate similar effects. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that the performance costs of value misalignment with managers can be explained by a decline in employee-led communication: fear of misunderstanding suppresses voice and information-seeking, increasing uncertainty about managerial expectations and lowering output.

Unwilling to reskill? Evidence from a survey experiment with Italian jobseekers

with R. Sadun (HBS), S. Inferrera (Queen Mary), A. Garnero (OECD) and M. Leonardi (Statale di Milano)

Coverage: The Economist

We study barriers preventing jobseekers from pursuing reskilling in high-demand occupations. Using a discrete choice experiment, we quantify the demand for reskilling among Italian jobseekers in two white-collar high-demand occupations—information technology assistant and construction technician—and identify its main determinants. Willingness to pay estimates show that participants are willing to pay to reskill into IT, but would require compensation to reskill into construction. Beliefs about monetary returns and social status help explain differences in reskilling demand, but perceived identity fit in the target occupation emerges as the most important individual-level factor shaping reskilling decisions. A light-touch randomized information intervention providing data on occupational returns significantly increases both stated interest in reskilling and actual engagement in real-world training.

Research in progress

Beyond bonuses: the incentive effect of a prosocial initiative on bankers (draft available upon request)

with N. Ashraf (LSE), O. Bandiera (LSE) and M. Fossi (LSE)

Encouraging hands-on job experimentation among teenagers: evidence from Switzerland (data collection)

with A. Brenoe (UZH), C. Schilter (Bern) and S. Wolter (Bern)

Friendly workplaces for working mothers: Experimental evidence on encouraging the creation of lactation rooms in Kenya (data collection)

with S. Fiorin (Bocconi)

Funding: J-PAL GEA, Weiss Fund, LEAP

Gender and the demand and supply of advice in teams (analysis)

with Shan Aman-Rana (University of Virginia) and Shamyla Chaudry (Lahore School of Economics)

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