Sofie Cairo   

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department for Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and at the Chair for Entrepreneurship at University of Zürich.

PhD in Economics (2021) from University of Copenhagen.

Contact: sc.si@cbs.dk  Link to:  CV

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

Research fields  

• Labor, social benefits and public policy 

• Gender, family and behavioral economics 

• Innovation, Science and Science Funding

Methods:  Applied microeconometrics, behavioral and experimental methods.

Data : Survey, experimental, bibliometrics, administrative registers.

Programs: R, Stata, SAS, Matlab

Intro

 I am currently designing a large field experiment  with Danish firms to investigate gender gaps in promotions (w/Garofalo and Tartari), running experiments with Danish funders (Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck), and investigating career outcomes of parents in Danish academia.

I was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard Business School, where I conducted research on health shocks and the direction of science  (w/ Myers, Kongsted and Koning). 

Before that I worked for Valentina Tartari at CBS to investigate motherhood penalties on female scientists in STEM relative to their male peers.  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.