Dr. Martina Zanella
Assistant Professor, Economics

Projects

• Title
  • Automation, Unemployment and Re-envisioning the Nature of Work
• Summary
  • As automation and technological change gather pace within the workplace, so too do skill obsolescence and unemployment. A proactive approach to reskill and retrain workers, particularly from the private sector, is crucial for avoiding sharp increases in unemployment and inequality as the magnitude of the estimated labour market changes is such that public sector policies alone will not adequately mitigate the risks (Card et al. 2018, Greenberg et al. 2003). In this direction, we propose an intervention, embedded within a multinational consumer goods company, that fosters a "purposeful change" by reorienting blue-collar workers who could potentially be affected by restructuring towards a growth mindset and an active approach to change. The intervention entails a combination of reflective workshops and experiential learning through community volunteering. This project will be able to inform policy on a sustainable and responsible automation process that meets the needs not only of the organization and the people directly impacted but also of the local community.
• Funding Agency
  • Nuffield Foundation
• Date From
  • 09/2021
• Date To
  • 09/2023

• Title
  • Group Composition and Group Decision-Making: Evidence from Municipal Council Meetings in South Korea
• Summary
  • Does having a seat at the table translate into influence in the decision-making process? In this paper, we study how group interactions change when quotas introduce females into South Korean municipal councils, shocking a status quo where women were nearly completely absent. Our key contribution is that we can study how group composition affects dynamics in a setting outside the lab with real consequences, by analyzing rich transcripts of data spanning >250,000 meetings, and by tracking the behavior of a councilor over 4 years of their term within the same group of councilors. Preliminary findings show that women introduced by quotas start out their term much less vocal than men, even when compared to rookie men equally lacking councilor experience. However, the gap between rookie men and rookie women nearly fully closes by the end of the term, suggesting that it is not differences in inherent talent that cause women to be less vocal and that rookie women gradually gain influence as councilors work together during the years. N.B. This paper constitutes the first step of a more ambitious initiative: to dissect the mechanisms behind how greater female representation in politics changes policy outcomes, focusing our field of vision on the decision-making process.
• Funding Agency
  • STICERD
• Date From
  • 2023

• Title
  • Working together: Gender segregation across firms
• Summary
  • Despite the mounting support for workplace diversity and the more developed understanding of the benefits for both equality and productivity, most economies exhibit stark gender segregation across industries, occupations, and firms. Whilst segregation along industry and occupational lines has garnered much attention, gender segregation across firms within industries remains poorly understood. Studies that have looked at this phenomenon have shown that gender segregation across firms accounts for a substantial share of gender gaps in wages and workplace satisfaction. The literature has shown that peers and the characteristics of the environment affect behaviours, however, it remains unclear how much of this relationship can be attributed to different types of people self-selecting into firms with a higher share of same-gender peers. If workplace gender composition is internalized in occupational choices, different gender representation might bring along a different workforce composition, with implications for workplace dynamics and employees" outcomes. To do so, we leverage a matched employer-employee dataset representative of the universe of firms in Switzerland between 1994 and 2021 and the cross-sectional heterogeneity in the density of firms within by sector/occupation across locations to identify self-selection.

• Title
  • Gender Differences in Confidence: Evidence from The Irish Economics Association Annual Conference
• Summary
  • In this project, we explore the existence of a gender gap in evaluations regarding other people"s work among economists " a crucial and common task in academics" day-to-day work. We examine reviewing decisions in the Irish Economic Association (IEA) Conference from 2017-2023 by exploiting a crucial characteristic of the revision process - reviewers are asked to provide an evaluation of the paper as well as a score about their confidence regarding their expertise in the field. We coupled this data with rich information regarding referees, authors, and papers that we collected from personal and institutional websites, CVs, and Google Scholar to document whether reviewers display a gender confidence gap and whether this depends on the reviewer"s or the paper"s characteristics. In a second step, we assess whether this confidence gap affects the likelihood of paper acceptance at the conference and, ultimately, whether it is correlated with the paper"s long-term outcomes - publication status and citations. This allows us to derive considerations regarding whether reviewers are accurate in their evaluations and how this accuracy depends on their confidence.