Elena Pastorino is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a faculty research fellow at the Department of Economics at Stanford University, and a social science research scholar at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research. Her interests are in the areas of labor economics, macroeconomics, and development economics. Her research focuses on understanding the determinants of wages, job mobility, employment, and consumption, and on evaluating the impact of government policies in both developed and developing countries.

Pastorino’s work studies the mechanisms that generate wage growth and persistent income and wealth inequality; the causes and consequences of aggregate fluctuations in employment; the impact of technological innovation, the minimum wage, and social insurance programs on the participation of low-skilled workers in US labor markets and on the competitiveness of US product markets; and the role of transfer programs in alleviating poverty in Latin America.
 
In 2019, Pastorino was awarded a grant from the Banque de France for her research on “Asset Prices and Unemployment Fluctuations.” In 2020, the National Science Foundation awarded Pastorino a grant for her research on “The Impact of Big Data on Dynamic Personalized Pricing: Theory and Evidence.”