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Growing up in Italy, where the early Greek and Latin philosophers were taught in high school, Virginia Minni’s favorite subject was philosophy, as it offered a framework for grappling with the complexity of the world. When she entered college at the University of Warwick in the UK, she channeled that interest into a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, reasoning that those additional subjects provided a better shot at post-college employment.
And it was in her first year, on the first day of the compulsory microeconomics course, when Minni had a revelation of sorts. “I don’t know what happened, maybe there was a magic spell,” Minni said with a laugh, “but listening to that professor made me realize that I wanted to be just like him.”
So, knowing nothing about academia and what it took to become a professor, Minni approached her teacher after that first class and told him of her inspiration. Minni’s professor told her that if she wanted a job like his, she needed to get her PhD, which eventually set her on the path to the London School of Economics (LSE) and, in 2024, to Chicago Booth as an assistant professor of economics.
Minni attended LSE for her PhD studies because she liked the school’s approach to labor economics, industrial organization and development economics. Her interest was based, in part, on her family’s experience in corporate management across the world, within companies ranging from the auto industry to the creative arts. “Seeing the work that members of my family did, and hearing a lot about how firms operate in different contexts, got me interested in studying these subjects,” she said.
However, her interest was not in traditional labor economics, which studies how workers and employers interact in labor markets, or in industrial organization, which studies how firms compete and interact in markets. Instead, Minni incorporates elements of both those fields to take a more micro focus on employees and managers within firms, studying such issues as corporate culture, meaning at work, and leadership.
“These issues are often labeled as ‘soft,’ but that’s mainly because they are inherently difficult to define and to measure empirically – furthermore, the data needed to study them are rarely accessible,” Minni said. “However, my research reveals that these issues are not soft at all; rather, they have a profound impact on worker productivity and firm performance.”
So how do you study what’s hard to measure and hard to observe? Human resources records and surveys of a firm’s employees, for example, are not publicly available, unlike a corporation’s financial statements. And you cannot just contact a firm and expect to receive this sensitive information. In practice, research of this kind requires a long-term partnership with a specific firm, built on trust and on clear guardrails, in effect becoming embedded in the firm while maintaining independence and the freedom to publish, according to Minni.
In one such case, Minni embedded herself into a multinational firm with 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers, with data from over 10 years in 100 countries. That work, which resulted in a paper that attracted media attention and interest from other business schools, revealed that good managers do more than meet budgets and achieve corporate goals: they have a profound and lasting influence on workers’ careers and, ultimately, on firm productivity. A central mechanism is talent allocation: high-performing managers not only recognize workers’ skills, but they also reallocate them to positions that best employ those skills, even if that means losing workers to another department.
As Minni writes: “My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.”
Minni’s recent work examines the same data to investigate the effects of male managers’ attitudes on gender pay gaps across space. When managers from countries with more progressive gender attitudes are assigned to an establishment in another country, the gender pay gap narrows by 4.9 percent points, about 18% of the baseline mean, largely through higher promotion rates for women. But these cultural influences extend further: Local managers who interact with the foreign manager (but do not report to the foreign manager), also promote women at a higher rate.
As with her work on managers’ reallocation of firm talent, her research on gender gaps points to the critical role of managers in shaping corporate culture. However, culture is also shaped from the bottom up. In a field intervention with white-collar employees, Minni studies how finding meaning at work affects worker choices and performance. She finds that low-performing workers are more likely to quit the firm, while those who remain improve their performance and receive higher compensation.
Some observers may wonder how questions about meaningful work relate to economics. However, Minni’s work follows a long line of UChicago research that began with Gary Becker’s seminal 1964 book on human capital. “I find that these questions and other issues relating to corporate culture matter a lot for the productivity of individual workers and, by extension, the firm.” Further, a better understanding of such micro mechanisms inside firms, Minni argues, not only improves our understanding of firm behavior but also can inform how economists understand aggregate productivity at a macro level.