Federica Bianchi's main interests have been social networks and their role in coordinating the economic activity in markets. Her work provided analytical and methodological tools to understand financial markets as networks of observed exchange events unfolding in continuous time. Her empirical work shows how the market micro-relational structure is ultimately produced by self-organizing properties of individual transactions that link changing sets of buyers and sellers.

Federica's current research focuses on studying the dynamics of innovation through the analysis of patent citations. Her aim is developing a novel conceptual framework for the understanding of innovation as existing in a latent space whereby patents dynamically evolve through time and, in turn, invite citations from nearby patents.