About

Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean for HBS Publishing and chairs the board of Harvard Business School Publishing. She is Faculty Co-Director of the HBS Digital Reskilling Lab, Faculty Co-Chair of HBS’s Project on Managing the Future of Work, Faculty Co-Director of the Harvard Project on the Workforce, and Faculty Co-Chair of the Project on Israel and the Regional Economy at HBS. She directs the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics.

Her research studies how management and organization drive productivity and growth, in companies and in the public sector. She co-founded several large-scale projects to measure management practices and managerial behavior, including the World Management Survey, the Executive Time Use Study, and the Management and Organizational Practices Survey of Hospitals, conducted with the US Census Bureau. This work has shown how widely the use of basic management practices varies across organizations and countries, and how much this matters for productivity. At the Digital Reskilling Lab, she studies large training investments made by private and public organizations, and how new technologies, including generative AI, change the way work is organized.

Her articles have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and other leading journals. Her Harvard Business Review articles received the McKinsey Award in 2018 and the HBR Prize in 2023, and she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar in 2023.

In Italy, she advised Prime Minister Mario Draghi in 2022 and chairs the independent scientific committee of the Fondo per la Repubblica Digitale. In 2021 she was named Grande Ufficiale of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and in 2022 she received the Fondazione De Sanctis Prize for Economics, awarded to the best Italian economist under 45. She holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where she is also Senior Associate Dean for HBS Publishing and Faculty Co-Director of the Digital Reskilling Lab. Her research studies how management and organization drive productivity, in companies and in the public sector. She co-founded several large-scale projects that measure management practices and what managers do, including the World Management Survey, the Executive Time Use Study, and the first large-scale survey of management in US hospitals, run with the US Census Bureau. Her articles appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, and her Harvard Business Review articles won the McKinsey Award (2018) and the HBR Prize (2023). She advised Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in 2022. She holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Faculty Co-Director of the HBS Digital Reskilling Lab. An economist, she studies how management and organization shape productivity in companies and the public sector. She co-founded the World Management Survey and holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.