Natalie Carlson

Assistant Professor of Management

Contact Information

Primary Email:
ncarlson@wharton.upenn.edu
Office Phone:
215-898-5962

office Address:
2015 SH-DH
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: Entrepreneurship, Contingent Work, Global Labor Markets, Digitization, Emerging Economies

Overview

Natalie A. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship and human capital, with a particular focus on emerging economies. Her work draws on a variety of methodologies, with a focus on experiments and computational methods. She has worked on field studies in collaboration with NGOs in settings such as Zimbabwe and Tanzania. She studied for her Ph.D. in Management at Columbia Business School, and holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.

Research

Natalie Carlson (2023), Differentiation in Microenterprises, Strategic Management Journal, 44 (5).
Abstract: Small unregistered firms contribute to a substantial proportion of global economic activity, particularly in developing regions. In explaining variation in productivity in these types of informal firms, research has focused primarily on the adoption of effective business practices and access to capital, with little focus on fundamental positioning. This article explores the nature of differentiation in microenterprises, introducing a text-based measure of differentiation using state-of-the-art sentence embeddings. Using a combined sample of nearly 10,000 microenterprises across eight developing countries, I examine whether (and which) microenterprises differentiate, whether differentiation is related to performance (and for whom), and whether any existing policy interventions affect differentiation.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie Carlson, Tarun Khanna (2019), Machine Learning Approaches to Facial and Text Analysis: Discovering CEO Oral Communication Styles, Strategic Management Journal, 40 (11).
Natalie Carlson (2017), Simple Acoustic-Prosodic Models of Conﬁdence and Likability are Associated with Long-Term Funding Outcomes for Entrepreneurs, Social Informatics.
Description: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Awards and Honors

Activity

Latest Research

Natalie Carlson (2023), Differentiation in Microenterprises, Strategic Management Journal, 44 (5).

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