Omer Ali is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. His work centers on topics in economic history, political economy, and urban economics, with a focus on racial inequality. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Duke University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Andrew Baker
Andrew Baker is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. His areas of interest include corporate governance, securities regulation, and the role of economic evidence in the adjudication of legal disputes. His current research explores the intersection of corporate governance and labor market outcomes. Prior work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Stanford Law Review. He earned a Ph.D. in business administration and J.D. from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University.
Jacob Bastian
Jacob Bastian is an assistant professor of economics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His research explores how public policy can reduce poverty, expand economic opportunity, and shape social attitudes, while also identifying potential unintended consequences. Much of his work focuses on how tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, affect the well-being of lower-income U.S. families. Bastian’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including AEJ: Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Labor Economics. His work has also been featured in major media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Economist. Prior to joining Rutgers, he completed a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. From 2023 to 2024, Bastian served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he focused on child poverty, child care, and increasing the supply of affordable housing.
Anna Croley
Anna Croley is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Yale University. Her research centers on industrial organization and public economics, with a focus on housing markets. In 2024, she served as a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where she worked on topics related to housing, tax, and competition policy. She holds a B.S. in applied mathematics and economics from Brown University.
Serena Goldberg
Serena Goldberg is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, focusing on labor and public economics. Her work primarily concerns education markets, maternal labor outcomes, and family economics. She is currently studying how the design of child care subsidy policies in the United States affects the labor market for child care workers, as well as the price and quality of child care. Her other ongoing work considers the effects of preschool availability on families in Kenya, the contributors of differences in the distribution of family income by race, and the determinants of for-profit college enrollment. Goldberg received her B.A. in economics, mathematics, and applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University.
Diego Känzig
Diego Känzig is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research interests are in macroeconomics with a focus on climate change and inequality. In his work, he studies the role of energy and climate change for growth and economic fluctuations, and how economic inequality and household finance matter for the macroeconomy and macroeconomic policy. Känzig holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London Business School.
Whitney Zhang
Whitney Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Blueprint Labs research associate. She is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Jerry A. Hausman Graduate Dissertation Fellowship. Her research explores the forces driving key firm decisions that affect workers, including scheduling, offshoring, and technology adoption. Her work on generative AI has received wide attention and was cited in the Economic Report of the President in both 2024 and 2025. Zhang received her S.B. in mathematical economics from MIT in 2021.
Katherine Magnuson
Katherine Magnuson is a Vilas Distinguished Professor of Social Work at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and a former director of the Institute of Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a national expert on the well-being and development of economically disadvantaged children and their families, with specific attention to unconditional cash transfers and early childhood education. Magnuson’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Administration of Children and Families, Office of Research Planning and Evaluation), Spencer Foundation, and Heising-Simons Foundation. She is a former associate editor of Child Development and Developmental Psychology. Magnuson’s awards and honors include winner of University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School Romnes and Vilas Faculty awards, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. She received her Ph.D. in human development and social policy at Northwestern University.
Matthew Denes
Matthew Denes is an assistant professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. His research focuses on empirical corporate finance and its intersection with entrepreneurship, venture capital, and political economy. His recent work studies the impact of government subsidies on entrepreneurial activities, particularly understanding the effects of U.S. federal support for small businesses and state-level investor tax credits. Using administrative data on U.S. tax filings, his research also contributes to the interaction between entry into entrepreneurship and labor market decisions in the context of the gig economy. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies, and widely presented in academic conferences. His research has been extensively supported by grants, including from the Kauffman Foundation, Block Center for Technology and Society, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Denes holds a B.S. in finance and computer science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Washington.
Spyridon Lagaras
Spyridon Lagaras is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Gies College of Business. His research broadly lies in the intersection of corporate restructuring, entrepreneurship, and labor economics, with a particular focus on leveraging large datasets to examine the role of human capital in motivating and shaping restructuring decisions by firms. Recent papers aim to understand the economic mechanisms through which restructuring events shape rent-sharing practices in employer-employee relationships and the channels through which technological shifts in the labor market and frictions in the institutional environment affect the employment trajectory and decisions of individuals. His scholarly contributions have been extensively presented in academic and professional conferences and published in leading finance journals, including the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics. Lagaras has been the recipient of grants from the Kauffman Foundation and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He holds a B.Sc. in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.