Sofie Cairo  (PhD) 

I am an assistant Professor at the Department for Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and postoc at the Chair for Entrepreneurship at University of Zürich.

Contact: s[email protected]  Link to:  CV

SoMe: Bsky: @cairosofie.bsky.social. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/sofie-cairo-6b2025b 

Research areas 

• Labor, social benefits and public policy  

• Research performance, impact and promotions after motherhood

• Gender and science funding 

• Leadership, promotions and gender

• Health shocks and direction of science

Methods:  Mainly RCTs and applied microeconometrics.

Data : Survey, experimental, bibliometrics, administrative registers.

Short intro

I am an assistant professor at CBS conducting research in gender and the economics of science.

I am currently running field experiments with two science funders (DK-top5) to increase persistence in the competition for funding among early-career scientists.  In parallel, I am running field experiments with firms to investigate gender gaps in promotions (w/Garofalo and Tartari), and investigating career outcomes of parents in academia.

During my previous position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard Business School, I started a project 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 unemployment insurance and welfare benefit recipients.  We designed and ran two large online experiments with the Ministry of Employment.  The results are published in the Journal of Public Economics and in 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.