Meet Our New Faculty: Luisa Cefala

Luisa Cefala | Assistant Professor | Dyson School

Meet Luisa Cefala, one of our newest faculty members to join the Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business. Cefala completed her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a post-doc at the Haas School of Business. Prior to her Ph.D., she obtained her BSc and MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, Milan, then moving to the U.S. to work for a year as a research professional at the Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern University.

Cefala’s research lies at the intersection of development, labor and behavioral economics, which she brings to the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics. In particular, she says, her research mainly focuses on the functioning of labor markets in low-income countries, and how market failures affect technology adoption. So far, her field work has focused on India and Burundi.

What is a research paper that is important to you, your work, or the world at large?

Cefala says that a research paper she’s particularly proud of is The Economic Consequences of Knowledge Hoarding, where she shows that sometimes individuals are not willing to share knowledge with their peers because of fear of losing some competitive advantage or some earnings.

What is a current issue in business or business education that you are interested in, and why is it important to you and your work?

“Interestingly enough, in the context that I study — diffusion of skills in rural labor markets in Africa — it turns out that this fear is real: at least in the short-term, when knowledge of a certain skill spreads widely in the labor market, workers who were skilled originally lose 8% of their earnings,” Cefala says. “In the paper, I show that this result is likely due to the fact that labor markets are very small in these villages, and workers compete for only a handful of jobs. This result points to the fact that the characteristics of markets in low-income countries — the fact that they are small and isolated — can prevent knowledge from diffusing widely.”

She goes on that, “I also show that workers’ expectations about their loss are overestimated. This is an issue that often happens in organizations or even in schools: people perceive the workplace or the classroom as being ‘zero-sum,’ that is, one’s success comes at the expense of another. This need not be the case, though. Often people do not anticipate that collaboration may be mutually beneficial, which is a concept that I would like to bring to the classroom.”