[6] After completing her PhD, Voena joined the Harvard Kennedy School as a post-doctoral fellow, followed by the University of Chicago as an assistant professor.
In work with Petra Moser and Fabian Waldinger in the American Economic Review,[12] Voena shows that German-Jewish immigration to the United States as a result of World War II increased patenting in subfields of chemistry specialized in by the arriving scientists.
[13] In related work, Voena and Moser study the Trading with the Enemy Act,[14] which allowed American firms to violate foreign intellectual property during World War I if deemed valuable to the US military effort.
[1] In work with Nava Ashraf, Nathan Nunn, and Natalie Bau, Voena shows that there exists a positive relationship between female education and bride price,[16] such that the effects of school construction programs such as Indonesia's INPRES are strongest in ethnic groups that maintain the practice.
[17] In another paper with Lucia Corno and Nicole Hildebrandt, Voena leverages plausibly exogenous variation in incomes resulting from drought to show that economic conditions affect the timing of marriage and child-bearing.