Luigi Guiso

Luigi Guiso is the AXA Professor of Household Finance at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance in Rome. His research interests include household financial decisions, the formation of preferences, and the role of culture in economic behavior.

With Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, Guiso studied whether companies’ advertised values were associated with measures of performance. Their research found no significant relationship for the proclaimed values they examined. Employees’ perceptions that managers were trustworthy and ethical, by contrast, were positively associated with several outcomes. The distinction helps explain why a list of values cannot stand in for evidence about how an organization operates. These are associations, however; the study does not establish that changing a values statement or a management practice will cause performance to improve.