Constança Esteves Sorenson

Constança Esteves-Sorenson joined the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2020 from the Yale School of Management, where she was a senior lecturer. She studies how psychological phenomena affect employee and firm performance.

She is motivated by the rigor that economics brings to data analysis. She notes that in an uncertain economy, the development of computing power and explosion of large data sets yield interesting methodologies for analyses that can be integrated into economics and management research. “I want MBAs to learn concepts and methodologies that will enable them to make better decisions in the workplace,” she says. She advises incoming classes to “learn as much as you can. Your human capital helps insure you against labor market volatility.”

Esteves-Sorenson’s current research explores how hiring, compensation and retention policies affect employee and firm performance. She has conducted field experiments on gift exchange and intrinsic motivation in the workplace and their effects on employees’ productivity. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science and The Economic Journal and has garnered media attention from Financial Times and The Economist.

Education

• Ph.D. Business and Public Policy, 2009, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
• M.A. Economics, Econometrics and Economic Theory, 2006, UC Berkeley
• MBA, 1999, Stanford Graduate School of Business
• B.A. Finance, 1994, Institute of Managerial Sciences, Lisbon University, Portugal

Areas of Expertise:

Behavioral Economics Labor Economics Personnel Economics

Publications

Do Monetary Incentives Undermine Performance on Intrinsically Enjoyable Tasks? A Field Test (with Robert Broce), Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming

Gift Exchange in the Workplace: Addressing the Conflicting Evidence with a Careful Test, Management Science, September 2018, Vol. 64, Issue: 9, pp. 3971-4470

Micro-costs: Inertia in Television Viewing (with Fabrizio Perretti), The Economic Journal, September 2012, Vol. 122, Issue: 563, pp. 867-902

The Gender Earnings Gap for Physicians and its Increase Over Time (with Jason Snyder), Economic Letters, July 2012, Vol. 116, pp. 37-41.