Daniela studies organizations and how organizational practices affect firm and labour outcomes across countries and industries. Her work spans the private sector (with a focus on manufacturing firms, family firms and multinationals) as well as the public sector (with a focus on schools, principals and teachers). The type of firm outcomes she studies include productivity and profitability (including profit shifting), and the type of labour outcomes she thinks about include labour sorting and selection, inequality (of wage and opportunity) and mental health.

She is an Assistant Professor at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and affiliated with the CEPR and the Productivity Partnership and a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics with the Centre for Economic Performance. She is a faculty fellow at the Cornell Smith Family Business Initiative and an invited researcher at JPAL LAC and JPAL North America. She works on two large data collection initiatives: the World Management Survey, the Development WMS.