Santiago Campos-Rodríguez's path to the UC Irvine Department of Economics begins, improbably, with football. As a youth in Costa Rica (which has a sizable population of expats from the U.S.), he was introduced to American football by his late brother's partner. By the time he was 17, he was a star quarterback, captaining the national team and attracting attention from U.S. scouts.

"Economics was not on my radar," he says. "Back then, my plan was around getting scholarships here just to come to school to play football."

Then he tore three muscles in his back, compromising his lumbar nerves. Wheelchair-bound for weeks, he wouldn't be able to play for a year. "All the offers, all the interest—I lost it," he says. His dream had evaporated.

He returned to school and began to pursue an undergraduate engineering degree at the University of Costa Rica, in the capital, San José. "I love the analytical part of it," he says. "But it felt disconnected from the issues I cared about."

At the time, in 2014, Costa Rica was going through an election that hinged on issues of economic inequality. "That's when I got really interested in these topics," says Campos-Rodríguez, who had been raised in a single-mother household. "I wondered which major would allow me to answer these big questions." In his sophomore year of undergrad in San José, he committed to the transition and decided to start studying economics instead.

At that point, a Ph.D. wasn't in the picture. "My goal was simply to get this degree that would open a lot of doors in the job market," he says. Things changed when he landed an internship at the Central Bank of Costa Rica, which issues money, regulates the country's monetary policy, and manages inflation to stabilize the colón. There he was introduced to brilliant economics researchers, most of whom had earned Ph.D.s in the U.S. They encouraged him to apply to grad school through a predoctoral program the Central Bank ran, which set him on the course toward Irvine.

Compared to other universities, UCI's faculty stood apart. "Antonio was a key driver of why I wanted to come here," he says, referring to associate professor of economics Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez, who has guided Campos-Rodríguez's work on the benefits of international trade.

"Coming from Central Bank, I was really influenced by the agenda they had in trade," he says. "Costa Rica is a small economy, so we rely a lot on the connections with foreign markets." His first paper focused on the intangible benefits of international trade (for example, what happens to a small domestic firm when it connects with an exporter).

However, the breadth and quality of UCI's economics faculty drove Campos-Rodríguez to expand his purview beyond trade and macroeconomics. "When I got here, I was so attracted by the possibility of working with such great researchers in different fields," he says, citing professors like Eric Swanson, Priyaranjan Jha, and Michael McBride, "one of the best economists in experimental economics," says Campos-Rodríguez, not to mention "a great lab." So why not take these classes if he had the chance? "Even though it will be a lot of work," he remembers thinking, "I couldn't miss out on that opportunity."

During year two of his Ph.D., he took courses in experimental economics as well as labor economics. That's how he met his second dissertation advisor (a co-chair alongside Rodriguez-Lopez), the economist David Neumark, Distinguished Professor of Economics and co-director for the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy. Under Neumark, Campos-Rodríguez became inspired to research female leadership and gender bias in business-to-business networks, which now comprises a larger share of Campos-Rodríguez's time. His access to de-identified administrative data sets from the Central Bank enabled him to explore the angle of gender in terms of both management and company networks. (Access to the information is protected by the bank in accordance with its confidentiality protocols.)

Firms with CEOs of the same gender are more likely to trade with each other. This type of same-gender affinity, or homophily, is not surprising. Birds of a feather do indeed tend to flock together; sociologists have found that doctors are more likely to refer patients to specialists whose gender matches their own, for example, and in high school and college, friendships are largely driven by gender, too. But the ramifications of this hadn't yet been explored in a corporate context—something that Campos-Rodríguez's time at the Central Bank could change.

"He came to UCI after extensive experience at the Central Bank of Costa Rica, which gave him unique access to one of the most detailed linked datasets in the world, covering employer-employee relationships, firm-to-firm transactions, and even civil registry information," says Rodriguez-Lopez. "This allows him to ask and answer questions that most researchers simply can’t tackle."

One of those questions is how gender bias affects companies' supplier choices. "That's a deviation from your optimal selection, right?" says Campos-Rodríguez. "Firms are missing better matches due to bias."

These economic costs can compound, stunting how companies grow. "I show in my research that, usually, female-led firms are smaller in size and occupy less central positions within the network. And if there is this gender bias, then it means that they are connecting also with the smaller and less-connected firms, reinforcing structural barriers that limit female-led firms’ growth and visibility."

Campos-Rodríguez's most recent work focuses on the gap in career advancement between women and men, suggesting that mothers are more stymied from achieving top management roles than fathers. He has also explored performance differences in companies based on CEO gender. "Female-led firms do better in the same conditions than male-led firms," he says, pointing to productivity and revenue per worker. Women are more likely to hire skilled workers and to increase capital intensity, he says, two complementary choices that enhance firm performance jointly.

"The [latter] project reflects both technical sophistication and a keen awareness of pressing social issues," says Rodriguez-Lopez. "His work spans international trade and applied labor economics, but it’s united by a rigorous empirical approach and a focus on real-world relevance." Over the past year, Campos-Rodríguez has also collaborated with professor Nancy Rodriguez, a criminologist from the School of Social Ecology, to research disparities of race, ethnicity, and gender in the criminal justice system.

After graduating next spring, Campos-Rodríguez is already committed to returning to the Central Bank to work as a senior economic researcher. He's sad to leave behind many people in Irvine: not only the "tremendous" faculty here but also classmates and teammates from Irvine FC, where he started playing semi-professional soccer last year. But he hopes to keep strong ties to the U.S.

"My plan is to keep this bridge between the amazing data sets and human capital that the bank has with scholars here," he says.

There's little doubt that he will. "Santiago is an exceptional fit for our department because of his intellectual rigor, creativity, and independence as a researcher," say Rodriguez-Lopez. "I’m confident in his strong academic future."

-Alison Van Houten for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UC Irvine School of Social Sciences