Topic: (Mis)Matching Superstar Engineers to Finance Jobs
Speaker: Nandini Gupta, Associate Professor, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
Date: December 6th (Wednesday)
Time: 10:00-11:30am
Location: Building 4, Room 101
Language: English
Abstract:
We study the early career choices and subsequent long-run career outcomes of elite engineers, who have the potential to be transformative entrepreneurs, and whose skills are in demand across sectors. One such sector is finance, which has experienced rapid wage growth in recent years, attracting talent from other industries. Using plausibly exogenous variation in local financial sector growth, we compare engineering classmates from the same school, major, and graduation year, who work in different metropolitan areas, and show that elite engineers from the most selective schools, and those who receive graduation honors, are more likely to switch to finance in high finance growth areas. Granular occupation descriptions show that elite engineers are more likely to work in financial sector occupations that do not require engineering skills. Exploiting our empirical design, we find that on average elite engineers who switch to finance in high-finance growth areas are less likely to become innovative entrepreneurs.
About the speaker:
My research is in the areas of corporate and international finance, with a focus on financial sector reforms, political economy of finance, and labor and finance. In published papers, I have looked at the effect of the partial privatization of government-owned firms on the financial performance of firms, the political economy of the government's privatization decision, the effect of stock market liberalization on industry growth, the political economy of the elimination of restrictions on foreign direct investment, the impact of the banking sector on corporate bankruptcy outcomes, and, the market value of corruption. Recent work considers the effect of financial access on self-employment and the effect of financial sector growth on the allocation of talented workers. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh and taught at the University of Michigan Business School prior to joining the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
