Sara Benetti is a PhD candidate in economics at the Vancouver School of Economics and a recipient of the Stone PhD Fellowship. Before arriving in Vancouver to pursue her doctoral degree in 2020, Benetti completed her undergraduate and master’s degree at Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy, and worked as a senior researcher at INCAE Business School in Costa Rica. Research Assistant Sophia Bertuzzi Samilski sat down with Benetti for an interview with the Stone Centre.
Growing up in Italy while spending extended periods of time outside the country ever since she was a teenager, Benetti shared how her upbringing exposed her to a variety of cultures and points of view, along with many people of different backgrounds.
“That definitely shaped who I am today and how I see the world today. And this is something that brought me to my research agenda.”
Her research lies in the realm of economic history and political economy, with a focus on understanding how different ethnic and cultural groups interact in multicultural societies, and how economic or institutional shocks affect their interactions.
Benetti’s most recent work focuses on the context of the United States, including her job market paper: The Social Consequences of Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Electrification and Immigrant Labor.
In the early 20th century, the United States’ population became more diverse as the country saw large waves of immigration, which Benetti noted resembled today’s cultural landscape. Additionally, during this period, the manufacturing sector became electrified, transforming factory production processes while increasing its share of immigrant labour. In tandem, these events caused a sharp reshaping of the sector’s labour force.
“[The U.S.] was a diverse society with a lot of immigrants coming in who were perceived as different and distant from the native majority,” Benetti said. “It’s very natural to think about inequality, and different paths of assimilationand intergenerational mobility between these groups.”
While her paper contributes to the large body of literature citing technological change as a catalyst for economic growth by improving efficiency, her main findings included a novel contribution: the societal impacts. In this unique historical setting, Benetti estimates the impact of electrification on American society and the social integration of immigrants at the time. She finds that electrification helped lower existing barriers that were keeping workers from different ethnic backgrounds separated from one another by replacing centralized steam engines with decentralized electric motors.
Previous production processes required coordination, collaboration, and movement on the factory floor, demanding knowledge of the same language.
With independently powered machines, the ethnic background of nearby co-workers mattered less. Benetti shows that electrified industries indeed became more diverse and less segregated along ethnic lines. The new production process prompted more heterogeneous workgroups and created opportunities for informal interactions amongst workers of diverse backgrounds, leading to gradual yet long-lasting social integration in ethnically mixed communities—both in the factory and beyond as neighborhoods where immigrant and native manufacturing workers lived became more diverse over time. Her research showcases how technological change can reshape social networks by promoting integration both at work and within local communities.
“I think it’s a positive story from technological change in production,” she said.
In the face of today’s technological change, Benetti emphasized the importance of not only understanding the intended consequences for the organization of labour and production, but also the unintended ones.
“I think for me, the main insight for today is really recognizing that there are these spillovers—what happens in the workplace really spills over to communities. It’s important to acknowledge that and be aware [of this interaction] in the policy debate.”
Looking forward, Benetti expressed a desire to stay in academia for the opportunity to continue her research agenda, while noting the present as a pivotal moment in economic research.
“It’s a super exciting point now because we have all this new data, all these new tools and all these exciting new methods that allow us to extract information from books, from newspapers, from poetry,” Benetti said. “We are really making a jump from what has been more traditional empirical work, until now, and all these new opportunities to explore alternative sources.”
“If you find the right context and you are a bit creative in how you measure things, we can learn a great deal about ongoing debates today.”