[2] In her final year at Bocconi, Nicholas Stern delivered a public lecture, discussing his experiences conducting research in Palanpur, Gujarat.

[5] She currently holds the Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics at LSE,[6][7] where she directs the State Research Program of the International Growth Centre.

[8] Alongside her academic appointments, Bandiera has been co-editor of Econometrica since 2016,[5][9] the first woman to hold the position,[10] and previously served on the editorial boards of Economica and the Journal of Labor Economics.

[2] In 2022, Bandiera co-founded the Hub for Equal Representation in the Economy, an LSE based research centre, alongside Camille Landais and Nina Rousille.

[15] Much of Bandiera's research examines public service delivery in the developing world, in particular the question of how to reduce corruption and ensure that the incentives of civil servants align with those of the beneficiaries they serve.

In work with Nava Ashraf, Edward Davenport, and Scott Lee, Bandiera shows through a randomised controlled trial that advertising career advancement opportunities in a health-worker recruitment drive in Zambia increases the quality of those hired, with better performance on training exams and similar degrees of pro-sociality.

[16] In other work with Michael Best, Adnan Khan, and Andrea Prat, Bandiera shows that transferring autonomy over procurement from monitors to field officers in Punjab, Pakistan reduces prices paid for government purchased goods, with no commensurate decrease in quality.

In work with Imran Rasul and Iwan Barankay, Bandiera partnered with a British fruit farm to randomly allocate labourers to two different compensation schemes: one in which workers receive bonuses based on their "relative" performance, and one in which they do not.

[18][19] They find that compensation contracts based on relative performance lead to lower productivity,[18] primarily because workers internalise the negative externality imposed on their co-workers.

[20] Finally, in work with Andrea Prat, Stephen Hansen, and Raffaella Sadun, Bandiera leverages detailed data on the diaries of 1,114 CEOs across six countries and machine learning algorithms to classify corporate leadership into archetypes.

[24] In recent work with Nava Ashraf, Virginia Minni, and Victor Quintas-Martinez, Bandiera leverages data on the employees of a multinational company to show that men earn on average more than women, but that the gap is heterogeneous across countries.

[13] In 2005, Bandiera married Imran Rasul,[31] a fellow economist now serving as Professor of Economics at University College London.