Before receiving tenure at Harvard in 2022, she held the Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Bocconi University, where she also acted as Scientific Director of the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Programs (LEAP).
Since 1998, La Ferrara has mostly worked at Bocconi University, where she currently holds the Fondazone Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics and acts as Scientific Director of the Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies.
[8] Furthermore, she is also affiliated with the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER),[9] CPER,[10] the Econometric Society,[11] and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT.
[12] In 2021, she was appointed to the World Bank–International Monetary Fund High-Level Advisory Group (HLAG) on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth, co-chaired by Mari Pangestu, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, and Nicholas Stern.
In the U.S., La Ferrara and Alesina find that low trust of others is pervasive among individuals who (i) live in a racially mixed and/or highly unequal community, (ii) are members in a group that has historically been discriminated against (e.g. African Americans and, to a lesser degree, women), (iii) are unsuccessful in terms of income and education, and/or (iv) recently had a series of traumatic experiences; by contrast, religious beliefs or ethnic origins don't affect trust of others.
In light of this finding, they suggest that violent conflict may benefit incumbent firms in the extractive sector by creating additional barriers to market entry, weakening governments' bargaining power with regard to the distribution of natural resource rents, and making the licensing of mining concessions less transparent.
[27] A third strand of La Ferrara's research addresses the "export" of alternative social norms through the expansion of access to modern media, e.g. television.
[29] Further work In her study of informal credit transactions within kinship based networks in Ghana, La Ferrara finds that repayment of loans is effectively induced through social enforcement, e.g. the sanctioning of defaulters' offspring, and that kin members sometimes adjust their lending behaviour (e.g. offering favourable terms of credit) on the characteristics of a creditor's parents in the expectation of reciprocity, i.e. that others will do the same with their offspring.