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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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.
Virginia Doellgast
Virginia Doellgast is the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of labor markets and labor unions, inequality, precarity, and democracy at work. She is author of Exit, Voice, and Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Disintegrating Democracy at Work (Cornell University Press, 2012); co-editor of International and Comparative Employment Relations (Sage, 2021) and Reconstructing Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2018); and co-editor of the ILR Review. Doellgast works with international universities and research institutes, policy organizations, and labor unions in her research, teaching, and outreach. She is a senior research fellow at the at the WSI-Hans Böckler Stiftung in Germany and was previously a faculty member at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at King’s College London. She was president of the Society for the Advancement of Economics in 2024-25. Doellgast received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.
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.
Brendan Moore
Brendan Moore is an economics Ph.D. student at Stanford University focusing on labor, macro, and public economics. Previously, he was a senior research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Moore’s academic research studies job loss and its many consequences, including Unemployment Insurance receipt, firm responses to UI policies, long-run wage effects, and retraining at postsecondary institutions. His research also documents key forces behind de-unionization in the United States. Moore is partnering with the Washington state Employment Security Department on a U.S. Department of Labor-funded project to determine the causes of incomplete UI receipt. As part of this research, he will study the labor market effects of a program intended to increase UI take-up among recently laid-off workers in the state of Washington. Moore received his B.A. in economics from Columbia University.
Eleanor Krause
Eleanor Krause is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business and Economics. Her work applies the insights and methods from public, labor, and urban economics to study questions related to the environment, economic opportunity, and geographic inequality. Much of her current work explores the distributional and labor market consequences of the clean energy transition. Krause received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Jessica H. Brown
Jessica H. Brown is an assistant professor of economics in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. She is a labor economist who focuses on the economics of the child care market. She has studied how the market responds to changes in the economic and policy environment, including how child care employment, quality, and prices respond to changes in macroeconomic conditions, the minimum wage, and immigration enforcement. Brown’s research has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Health Economics and featured in the popular press in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. Brown holds a B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.