Assist. Prof. Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Ph.D.

Organizations, Innovation and Culture

Kieu-Trang Nguyen’s research focuses on topics related to the economics of organizations, innovation, and culture, especially in terms of their interplay. She investigates the role of cultural factors in shaping organizations, as seen through the lens of the firm’s internal organization, innovative processes and production, as well as important labor, demographic, and political phenomena.
Ms. Nguyen’s has examined the effect of trust, a part of firm’s culture, on firm’s innovation, building an important bridge between the role of trust in organizations and its importance to economic development. Relatedly, she is developing a new project on the vertical transmission of scientific interests and capacity by ethnic culture across US universities.
Ms. Nguyen has other ongoing projects on cultural factors in organizations that could develop into joint research projects. In “Corporate Hierarchies in the 21st Century,” she leverages a dataset of internal firm organization of a large sample of firms to document the phenomenon dubbed “the bamboo ceiling,” by which Asian employees can move up more easily across technical positions, but are usually stuck before reaching top management positions. In “The Cultural Origin of Gender Gaps in Pay and Mobility: Evidence from Immigrants and Firms in Canada,” she uses multiple administrative databases, including matched employer-employee data from Canada, to show that gender norms that immigrants inherited from their cohort in their country of origin is an important determinant of the gender gap in job mobility and in pay. In “Polarized Consumption from Polarized Politics,” she exploits Trump’s political rallies and the cultural backdrop of the US to show how polarization in American politics affects the pattern of consumption across different populations of Americans. In “Astrology and Matrimony: Social Reinforcement of Religious Beliefs on Marriage Matching in Vietnam,” she investigates the real economic consequences of a system of religious Taoist beliefs on marriage fortune in Vietnam, and shows that the beliefs are self-fulfilling because of the social reinforcement via social insurance among a couple’s extended family.
Kieu-Trang (Trang) Nguyen is an Assistant Professor at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Illinois. She obtained her PhD in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.