Alejandra Ros Pilarz is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work. Her research agenda aims to improve the well-being of working families with low-incomes through policy-relevant research. Her research examines the effects of parental employment and children’s early care and education contexts on family well-being and children’s development. She also examines how public policies shape parents’ employment, children’s early care and education contexts, and, ultimately, influence child and family well-being. Pilarz received her A.M. and Ph.D. from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and her B.A. in psychology from the University of Notre Dame.
Expert Type: Grantee
Amy Claessens
Amy Claessens is a professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the Carl and Mary Gulbrandsen Distinguished Chair in Early Childhood Education and the associate director of the Center for Research on Early Childhood Education. Her research focuses on improving the well-being of families and young children in a variety of contexts, including child care and the early years of school. Her research has been funded by a wide range of agencies, including the Administration for Children and Families and the Heising-Simons Foundation. Claessens has a Ph.D. in human development and social policy from Northwestern University.
Dmitri Koustas
Dmitri Koustas is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research spans labor economics, public economics, macroeconomics, and household finance, with a particular focus on the future of work. In particular, his research measuring and understanding participation in the gig economy has helped inform the policy discussion around gig work, future survey design, and tax administration. In addition to academic publications, his research has been featured in the National Academy of Sciences report on “Measuring Alternative Work Arrangements for Research and Policy,” in multiple editions of the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ Economic Report of the President, and in major media outlets. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.
Margarita Tsoutsoura
Margarita Tsoutsoura is an associate professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of Finance, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Finance. Tsoutsoura was formerly a tenured associate professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and associate professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on corporate finance with an emphasis on privately held firms, corporate governance, and labor and finance. Her work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. The Fulbright Fellowship, the Jensen Prize, the Wharton School-WRDS Award, and the WFA Trefftzs Award are among Tsoutsoura’s other varied honors and fellowships. Her research has been covered extensively in popular media outlets, including in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, BusinessWeek, the International Herald Tribune, and CNBC. She received her Ph.D. in economics and finance from Columbia University.
Seula Kim
Seula Kim is a postdoctoral research associate in the Louis A. Simpson Center for the Study of Macroeconomics and the Department of Economics at Princeton University. In the fall of 2024, she will join Pennsylvania State University as an assistant professor of economics. Her primary research areas include macroeconomics, firm dynamics, innovation, and economic growth. Her research explores various aspects of firm dynamics and their implications for economic growth and inequality by using quantitative heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models with micro-level administrative and survey data. Specifically, her recent work focuses on understanding how workers’ uncertain job prospects impact the wages and growth of young firms and contribute to business dynamism and productivity growth at the aggregate level. In addition, she is actively involved in research related to the trends and determinants of firm innovation and their role in economic growth, as well as the impact of spatial variations in market structures on inequality. Kim received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland in 2023 and holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics from Seoul National University.
Alaa Abdelfattah
Alaa Abdelfattah is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests meet at the intersection of monopsony power, public policy, and skill-driven income inequality. More specifically, she studies the effect of public policy and aggregate market shocks on skill demand and wage distribution in local labor markets. The main chapter of her dissertation examines the spillover effects of government-subsidized million-dollar projects on incumbent firms’ skill demand and posted wages. Other ongoing work examines the effect of COVID-19-induced labor shortages and the federal contractor minimum wage on employers’ skill demand and wage distribution. Abdelfattah received her B.A. in economics from Middlebury College and her M.A. in economics from the University of California, Davis.
Stuart Craig
Stuart Craig is an assistant professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. His research focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of rising healthcare spending, with a focus on competition and price-setting in business-to-business healthcare markets. Craig’s past work has examined horizontal mergers and other sources of pricing power in markets for medical supplies, hospital services, and employer-sponsored insurance premiums. Craig completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 2021. From 2021–2023, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy.
Natalia Luka
Natalia Luka was a Dissertation Scholar at Equitable Growth from 2023-2024.
Natalila Luka is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Sociology, studying economic sociology, organizations, and technology. Her research uses mixed methods to study corporations as sites of broader changes in the economy, with a particular interest in understanding the tensions between shareholder and stakeholder capitalism. Her dissertation studies workplace protests (employee activism) in U.S. corporations from the 1960s to the present. Nedzhvetskaya is a founding member of the nonprofit Collective Action in Tech, which hosts the largest public archive of protests in the technology industry. Her research on the tech industry has been featured in The Guardian, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, NBC News, NPR, The LA Times, and TIME, and has been funded by the Jain Family Institute, the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy, and the Berkeley Culture Initiative. Nedzhvetskaya earned a B.A. in social studies from Harvard College and an M.A. in sociology from Columbia University.
Anna Malinovskaya
Anna Malinovskaya is a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Her fields of specialization are public economics and applied econometrics. She is particularly interested in the economics of human capital accumulation and the interactions of human capital accumulation with policy. In her job market paper, she is studying the long-term health and human capital impacts of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and the complementarity effects from exposure to multiple large-scale public programs during childhood. In her other dissertation research, she uses individual-level Medicaid claims data to study whether access to mental health care under Medicaid is effective in preventing teen and adolescent pregnancy.
Jonathan Kowarski
Jonathan Kowarski is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research explores the effect of government intervention on income inequality, labor market power, and long-run worker outcomes. In his main dissertation project, he analyzes how Clean Air Act requirements change labor market structure, wages, and employment over time, and how these wage and employment effects spill over to affect workers in unregulated firms and industries. Additionally, he has published research documenting how the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic differed by income, race, and ethnicity. Kowarski received his B.A. in economics at the University of Chicago and M.A. in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.