Claudia Olivetti

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Claudia Olivetti, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University, is interested in the study of family decisions and their interaction with the macroeconomy. Her previous research has explored the importance of changes in the wage structure in explaining women’s changing roles both in the family and in the workplace over the past few decades. She has also worked on the investigation of international patterns of employment and wages by gender.

As a Radcliffe Institute fellow, Olivetti will focus on the study of the emergence and persistence of gender differences in wages and in the division of labor within the household. She will investigate, both theoretically and empirically, the hypothesis that gender-wage differentials arise from the interaction between the intrahousehold allocation of labor and the contractual relation between firms and workers in the presence of private information on workers’ labor market attachment. She will also use comparable panel data sources for the United States and Europe to explore the reasons why women in other developed economies, unlike their US counterparts, did not dramatically increase their labor supply over the past few decades, even in presence of similar cultural and technological changes.

Olivetti received her doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. She has previously been awarded fellowships from several Italian institutions, as well as prizes for excellence in teaching and in research from the University of Pennsylvania and from Boston University.