Professor Roberta Dessi

Roberta Dessi received her BA and MA from Cambridge, her MSc from the London School of Economics and her PhD from Cambridge. She first worked in Cambridge in the Department of Applied Economics; she was a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and subsequently became a Professor/Reader at the Toulouse School of Economics (where she still holds the position, on unpaid leave), before returning to Cambridge. Since 2015, she has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), first in the Industrial Organisation programme and then in the Organisational Economics programme.

Roberta's research interests span several areas of economics. In Corporate Finance, Industrial Organisation and Organisational Economics, she has explored the links between managerial incentives, labour contracts and the financial structure of publicly listed companies. She has also studied the relationship between entrepreneurial startups and financial intermediaries such as venture capitalists, with a particular interest in the implications for innovation.

In Behavioural and Experimental Economics, her work has investigated how individuals form and update beliefs, including the role of memory and cultural transmission, as well as belief biases due to motivated cognition. Several of her research projects examine the interaction between economic and psychological incentives, at the individual level (studying their effects on behaviour in different contexts, from effort exerted on intellectually demanding activities to voluntary contributions to public goods) and at the economy-wide level.

A third strand of her research lies at the intersection between Organisational Economics and the Economics of Networks, investigating the role of social capital and group dynamics.