About

Marianne Bertrand is the Chris P. Dialynas Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor. Professor Bertrand is an applied micro-economist whose research covers the fields of labor economics, corporate finance, and development economics. Her research in these areas has been published widely, including numerous research articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Finance.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Labour economics
• Economic growth
• Law
• Demography
• Medicine
• Demographic economics
• Social psychology
• Accounting
• Market economy
• Public relations
• Public economics
• Gender studies
• Marketing
• Political economy
• Anthropology
• Finance
• Virology
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Investing in Influence: Investors, portfolio firms, and political giving

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-09-29

  datasetOpen access

  This package contains the replication file, which includes data sets obtained from public databases, for the paper titled "Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving." Additionally, we provide information on other purchasable databases necessary for replicating the results of this study. The subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning" contains the codes and public data sets required to construct the data sets that are needed for the empirical analysis. The subsequent subfolder, "Part2_DataAnalysis," includes the codes used to generate the empirical results presented in the paper. A readme file is included to provide further details, along with comments within the codes and various folders for enhanced clarity. We also include the list of data sets that need to be purchased in order to be able to run the codes in the subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning". Most of the codes were executed using SAS, Stata, WRDS SAS Studio, and Python. Due to the computational complexity involved and the large size of data sets utilised in the study, the majority of the codes were executed on servers equipped with at least 512 GB of RAM and at least 1.5 terabytes of free space.

  PublisherDOI

• Investing in Influence: Investors, portfolio firms, and political giving

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-09-29

  datasetOpen access

  This package contains the replication file, which includes data sets obtained from public databases, for the paper titled "Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving." Additionally, we provide information on other purchasable databases necessary for replicating the results of this study. The subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning" contains the codes and public data sets required to construct the data sets that are needed for the empirical analysis. The subsequent subfolder, "Part2_DataAnalysis," includes the codes used to generate the empirical results presented in the paper. A readme file is included to provide further details, along with comments within the codes and various folders for enhanced clarity. We also include the list of data sets that need to be purchased in order to be able to run the codes in the subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning". Most of the codes were executed using SAS, Stata, WRDS SAS Studio, and Python. Due to the computational complexity involved and the large size of data sets utilised in the study, the majority of the codes were executed on servers equipped with at least 512 GB of RAM and at least 1.5 terabytes of free space.

  PublisherDOI

• Contract Labor and Establishment Growth in India

  Econometrica · 2025-01-01 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) requires large manufacturing plants to pay substantial costs if they wish to shrink their workforce. Since the early 2000s, these large plants have dramatically increased their use of contract workers who are not subject to these regulatory constraints. Between 2000 and 2015, the contract labor share in non‐managerial employment nearly doubled at establishments with more than 100 workers (from 21 to 40 percentage points), while it only increased from 14 to 17 percentage points at establishments with less than 50 workers. Over the same period, the thickness of the right tail of the establishment size distribution in formal Indian manufacturing plants increased, the average product of labor at large plants declined, the job creation rate for large plants increased, and the probability that large plants introduced new products rose. We argue that these changes were caused by the increased adoption of contract labor. In a model of establishment growth subject to firing costs, we show that easing access to contract labor increased TFP in Indian manufacturing by 7.3% since the early 2000s, occurring all through a one‐time reduction in misallocation between large and small plants with negligible change in the long‐run growth rate.

  PublisherDOI

• Email Study

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-09-18

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2024-05-01

  article

  Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago about their work in the formal, informal, and criminal sectors. Noncriminal work is common. Two-thirds of respondents specialize solely in the criminal or noncriminal sectors, both earning about minimum wage at the median. Those who mix across sectors typically earn higher wages. We describe workers by type to demonstrate how better understanding sectoral specialization could inform program design.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Barriers to Paternity Leave Taking: Evidence from Japan

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-02-19

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Barriers to Paternity Leave Taking: Evidence from Japan

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-02-19

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Email Study

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-09-18

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Guerre hybride en mer Rouge - Houthis contre coalition occidentale

  Sécurité globale · 2024-04-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Barriers to Paternity Leave Taking: Evidence from Japan

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-02-19 · 1 citations

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sendhil Mullainathan

  University of Chicago

  201 shared

• Bruno Crépon

  École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique

  113 shared

• Alicia Marguerie

  93 shared

• Robin Burgess

  87 shared

• Patrick Premand

  Impact

  81 shared

• Antoinette Schoar

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  67 shared

• Francesco Trebbi

  60 shared

• Guo Xu

  50 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Universite Libre de Bruxelles

  1991

• M.S.

  Universite Libre de Bruxelles

  1992

• Ph.D.

  Harvard University

  1998

Awards & honors

• 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize
• 2012 Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize for Outstandin…
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021