prof. dr. Klarita Gërxhani

Full Professor, School of Business and Economics, Ethics, Governance and Society

, Tinbergen Institute

Personal information

Klarita Gërxhani is Professor of Behavioral Socio-Economics at the School of Business and Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She also serves as Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the same school.

Klarita holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Amsterdam, obtained at the Tinbergen Institute. A scholar of international standing, she is a lifelong member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and holds the title of Knight of the Order of the Academic Oak, awarded by the President of Albania. Prior to joining VU Amsterdam, she held a full professorship at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, and previously served as Postdoctoral Researcher, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam.

Research

Klarita's research bridges behavioral economics and economic sociology, occasionally drawing on social psychology and political science, to understand how social hierarchies, institutions, and norms shape individual choices and societal outcomes. Through experimental and survey methods, she tackles questions of inequality, discrimination, and institutional change.

Her work rests on four interconnected pillars. The first pillar examines gender inequality in hiring and competition, investigating not only why employers discriminate (demand-side), but also gender differences in performance under different competitive settings (supply-side). The second pillar, intersectionality, introduces a novel lens to labor market research by examining how overlapping social identities - gender, race, and socioeconomic background - combine to shape stereotype formation and evaluation. The third pillar studies institutions and societal outcomes, with a focus on tax evasion and informal economies in post-communist societies. The fourth, endogenous institutional change, asks how individuals challenge the very institutions that govern them.

Sector: Labor markets, Public sector, Civil society
Application domain: Workplace diversity and inclusion, Labor market policy, Institutional economics, Informal economies.

Research Interests:

Behavioral socio-economics
Status-ranking competition and gender inequalities
Discrimination and intersectionality
Labor markets and organizations
Institutional theory and endogenous institutional change
Social norms and behavior
Informal economies and tax evasion
Social capital
Laboratory, field, and survey experiments

Teaching

Klarita has taught at all levels of higher education, from bachelor to PhD, with a profile that spans behavioral socio-economics, gender and inequality, experimental methodology, institutions and organisations, and ethics. She has been particularly active at the research master and PhD level, having designed and taught courses at the European University Institute, the University of Amsterdam, and the Tinbergen Institute PhD Summer School. At VU Amsterdam, she currently teaches in the Bachelor programme in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and in the SBE Bachelor programmes International Business Administration and Econometrics and Operations Research.

CURRICULUM VITAE

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