About

Sophie Calder-Wang is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the Wharton School, with secondary appointments in Business Economics & Public Policy and Finance. Her research interests include industrial organization, digitization, and urban economics. Calder-Wang has contributed to understanding how markets price housing amenities, introducing novel methods such as the 'anti-instrument' approach to estimate the implicit price of flood risk and other amenities amid unobserved quality. Her work also explores the impact of algorithmic pricing in the multifamily rental market, demonstrating how such technologies influence rent setting, market responsiveness, and potential coordination among managers. Her research extends to examining gender diversity and performance in venture capital, analyzing how external social factors like high-profile gender discrimination trials influence hiring practices and investment behaviors. Calder-Wang has also investigated the distributional impacts of the sharing economy on housing markets, estimating welfare losses for renters and identifying which demographic groups are most affected. Her scholarly contributions provide insights into market mechanisms, policy implications, and the role of technological and social factors in real estate and finance. She is actively involved in teaching courses on real estate investments, equipping students with financial, economic, and quantitative tools to analyze real estate markets.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Industrial organization
• Finance
• Labour economics
• Market economy
• Law
• Microeconomics
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• The Price and Distributional Impact of Flood Risk Disclosure: Evidence from US Housing Platforms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Diversity in Venture Capital

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Housing Quality Using Revealed Preference: A Geographic PageRank Approach

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Pricing Neighborhood Amenities: A Proxy-Based Approach

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Diversity in Venture Capital

  2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diversity in Venture Capital

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Coordinated vs Efficient Prices: The Impact of Algorithmic Pricing on Multifamily Rental Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Economics
  • Microeconomics
  PublisherDOI

• Venture Capital's “Me Too” Moment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Venture Capital's 'Me Too' Moment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Venture Capital’s “Me Too” Moment

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-04-01 · 9 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we document the historically low rate of hiring of women in the venture capital sector. We find that the high-profile Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination trial had dramatic treatment effects. In difference-in-differences regressions, we find that the rate of hiring of female venture capitalists increased substantially after the trial and that the hiring was more pronounced in states that were more receptive to the exposure. We use the state-level mandated maternity benefits as an instrument for the receptivity to the treatment effects of the Pao Trial. We also show that the fraction of founders who are female increases after the Pao Trial, but that the increase is driven entirely by the hiring of female venture capitalists. There is no increase in the propensity of male venture capitalists to invest in female founders in the post-Pao Trial period.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul A. Gompers

  35 shared

• Kanyuan Huang

  5 shared

• Ariel Pakes

  5 shared

• Mark Shepard

  Harvard University

  3 shared

• Jack R. Porter

  3 shared

• Patrick Sweeney

  Harvard University

  3 shared

• William A. Levinson

  2 shared

• Gi Heung Kim

  University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Research Teaching Awards and Honors