Paola Sapienza is a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management. She also serves as a faculty fellow for the Zell Center for Risk Research, a research affiliate of the Center for Economic Policy Research and a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research's program on corporate finance.

Sapienza's areas of expertise include banking and financial institutions, behavioral economics, behavioral finance, corporate finance, emerging markets and regulation of financial markets, private equity and venture capital. Sapienza has written articles on banking, social capital, trust and financial development. Her work has been published in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and Science. She currently serves as an associate editor of Management Science. As a by-product of her research on trust and financial markets, she launched the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, along with Luigi Zingales (University of Chicago Booth School of Business).

Prior to joining Kellogg, Sapienza worked as an economist in the research department of Bank of Italy. She received a bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude from Università Bocconi in Italy, and an MA and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

Professor Sapienza is an independent board member of Assicurazioni Generali SpA since April 2010 and an elected director of the American Finance Association since January 2011.