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.
Expert Type: Grantee
Michael Navarrete
Michael Navarrete is the Alice Rivlin Dissertation Fellow at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy and a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics Department at the University of Maryland. He is an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he works on projects designed to modernize key economic statistics such as inflation using scanner-level data. He is also working on the RESET project, which is supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Navarrete’s research is on Unemployment Insurance benefits, with a focus on how administrative burdens at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a decline in consumption. He is also interested in income inequality, as well as how inflation rates vary geographically across the United States. He received a B.A. in economics and French from Williams College.
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.
Andres Drenik
Andres Drenik is an economist specializing in macroeconomics and international finance. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, Drenik was an assistant professor at Columbia University, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and a visitor at Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. His research focuses on a range of topics, including pricing behavior in foreign currency in emerging economies, the impact of currency choice in domestic contracts on optimal monetary policy, and the redistributive effects of exchange rate policies. His recent research on macro-labor economics explores the dynamics of labor markets after nominal devaluations, the international price of remote work, and the effects of wage rigidities on labor market flows. Drenik earned his B.A. and M.A. in economics from Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina in 2006 and went on to complete his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University in 2016.
Christian Moser
Christian Moser is an assistant professor within the Economics Division at Columbia University Business School and an affiliated faculty member within the Department of Economics at Columbia University. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics. Previously, Moser was a senior economist within the Research Division and a visiting scholar at the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a research associate at the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute at the University of Minnesota, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a daily visitor at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, and a visitor at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Moser’s research revolves around topics in macroeconomics, labor economics, and public economics, with a focus on income inequality. He has taught related courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Moser received a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Princeton University.
Andres Blanco
Andres Blanco is a research economist and associate adviser on the macroeconomics team in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His major field of study is macroeconomics, with particular interests in monetary economics, labor markets, and methods for macroeconomic modeling. Blanco is also a visiting scholar in the Economics Department at Emory University. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed in 2023, he spent 7 years as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. He has published his research in several journals, including Econometrica, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Quantitative Economics. Blanco received his Ph.D. in economics in 2015 from New York University and his master's degree in economics in 2009 from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2007.
Zack Cooper
Zack Cooper is an associate professor of public health and of economics, and serves as director of health policy at the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Cooper is a health economist whose work is focused on producing data-driven scholarship that can inform public policy. In his academic work, he has analyzed the impact of competition in hospital and insurance markets, studied the influence of price transparency on consumer behavior, investigated the causes of surprise out-of-network bills, and examined the influence of electoral politics on healthcare spending growth. Cooper has published his research in leading economics and medical journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the New England Journal of Medicine. He has also presented his research at the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Zarek Brot-Goldberg
Zarek Brot-Goldberg is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, as well as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate of the HMR Lab at Harvard University and Gilbert Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies antitrust and regulatory policy in U.S. healthcare. Some of his current research examines the anticompetitive effects of hospital mergers, the ramifications of prior authorization rules in Medicare Part D, and the differences in beneficiary composition and utilization between Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2019 and spent the 2019–2020 academic year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University. His research has been published in top economics journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. He won the 2018 National Institute for Health Care Management Research Award for his study on the inefficiency of high-deductible health insurance plans.
Aaron Sojourner
Aaron Sojourner is a labor economist and senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. His research focuses on the effects of labor-market institutions on economic productivity and society, policies to promote efficient and equitable development of human capital, and behavioral economic approaches to consumer financial decisions. He serves on the ILR Review international editorial board and received the John T. Dunlop Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. His research won the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences editorial board’s 2020 Cozzarelli Prize for Behavioral and Economic Sciences. Sojourner has a wide range of policy experience and community service. He is a member of the Minnesota State Advisory Council on Early Childhood Care and Education and chairs the Constellation Fund’s Impact Council. Previously, he spent the 2016–2017 academic year in Washington, DC, serving as a senior economist for labor at the Council of Economic Advisers, served on Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges’ Cradle-to-K cabinet, as a member of the Human Capital Research Collaborative’s steering committee, a director of Spring Bank (a community bank in the Bronx and Harlem in New York), and a fellow in the U.S. Senate’s Labor Policy Office. Sojourner completed his Ph.D. in economics at Northwestern University in 2009 and was a pre-doctoral fellow in the university’s Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences. He also has an M.A. in public policy analysis from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history from Yale University. From 2009 to 2022, he worked as a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.