Associate Professor
Economic Analysis & Policy
About
Ricardo Perez-Truglia is an Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business.
Ricardo teaches Microeconomics for MBAs. In 2022, he was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in MBA Teaching.
Ricardo’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral economics, political economy and public economics. Perez-Truglia intends his research to inform firms and policy makers in the developed and developing world, leading to practical applications.
One central theme in his research is how firms and individuals acquire and process information. Individuals hold many beliefs that are divorced from reality, even when it comes to basic concepts. They do not understand their own position in the income distribution, or the probability that they are audited by the IRS. In order to understand people’s motivations, we need to know what people really believe. Perez-Truglia has applied this framework to topics such as inflation and home price expectations, tax compliance and preferences for redistribution.
In 2020, he was named a Sloan Research Fellow, an award that recognizes outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study. Ricardo’s research has been published in premier academic journals and has been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and National Public Radio.
Ricardo received his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2014. Before joining Haas in 2020, he worked at UCLA-Anderson and Microsoft Research. Ricardo grew up in the Ciudadela neighborhood near Buenos Aires. Ricardo and his wife (Marina) have three children: Alma, Lucas and Nicolas.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Behavioral Economics
- Political Economy
- Public Economics
- How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons. Journal of Political Economy.
2022 - The Effects of Income Transparency on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. American Economic Review.
2020 - Partisan Interactions: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the United States. Journal of Political Economy.
2017 - Conveniently Upset: Avoiding Altruism by Distorting Beliefs About Others’ Altruism. American Economic Review.
2015
At Haas since 2020
- July 2020 – Present: Associate Professor, Economic Analysis & Policy, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
- July 2016 – June 2020: Assistant Professor, Global Economics and Management, Anderson School of Management, UCLA.
- July 2014 – June 2016: Post-Doctoral Researcher, Microsoft Research New England.
- 2021-: Co-Editor, Journal of Public Economics.
- 2020–: Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
- 2019–: Research Director, Research Institute for Development, Growth and Economics (RIDGE)
- 2016–: Visiting Professor, Universidad de San Andres
- Spanish
Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in MBA Teaching
2022
Sloan Research Fellow
2020
- Here’s what would happen if Americans could look up everyone’s salary, MarketWatch, 09/30/2021
- Can’t come to Berkeley? Haas launches new flex program to draw more students, Fortune, 08/10/2021
- Study suggests male bankers benefit from smoking and drinking, eFinancialCareers, 07/09/2021
- A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters, The New York Times, 03/18/2021
- UCLA Anderson’s Perez-Truglia: The Old Boys’ Club Still Promotes Its Own, Poets & Quants, 01/29/2020
- Breaking the Salary Sharing Taboo, New York Times Magazine, 02/19/2020
- Friends with bonuses: men get ahead by befriending the boss, The Telegraph, 02/18/2020
- Study: How Schmoozing Helps Men Get Ahead, Harvard Business Review, 01/29/2020
- A third of the gender pay gap can be explained by schmoozing between men and their male bosses, Quartz, 12/19/2019
- Hundreds of journalists anonymously reveal their salaries on viral spreadsheet, challenging workplace taboo, Washington Post, 11/14/2019
- Should you decide what you are paid?, Financial Times, 11/28/2018
- Happy ‘National Jealousy Day’! Finland Bares Its Citizens’ Taxes, New York Times, 11/01/2018
- The Motivating (and Demotivating) Effects of Learning Others’ Salaries, Harvard Business Review, 10/25/2018
- My Boss Makes What?!, Wall Street journal, 08/06/2018
- Shaming Those Who Skip Out on Taxes, New York Times, 04/15/2015
- Microeconomics, MBA 201A