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.
Expert Type: Grantee
Yana Gallen
Yana Gallen is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She is a labor economist studying the gender wage gap. Her recent research estimates the effects of unplanned pregnancies on women’s careers and explores whether delaying pregnancy can reduce these career impacts. Her work also examines how new entrants to the labor market learn to navigate work-family trade-offs. Gallen received a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University in 2016.
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.
Jhacova Williams
Jhacova Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University and previously worked at Xavier University of Louisiana, Clemson University, the Economic Policy Institute, and RAND Corporation before joining the faculty at American University. She is an applied microeconomist focusing primarily on economic history and cultural economics. Her previous work has examined Southern culture and the extent to which historical events have impacted the political behavior and economic outcomes of Southern Black Americans. Recent examples include historical lynchings and the political participation of Black Americans, and Confederate symbols and Black-White labor market differentials. She has also done a series of projects investigating the role of structural racism in shaping racial economic disparities in labor markets. Williams received a B.S. in mathematics from Xavier University of Louisiana, a M.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Ph.D. in economics from Louisiana State University.
Jordan Richmond
Jordan Richmond is an assistant professor of finance at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research interests lie in public economics, labor economics, and corporate finance. His existing work studies the impacts of corporate tax policies on investment and financing choices and evasion and avoidance behavior. In ongoing work, Richmond develops dynamic models of corporate behavior and explores the distributional consequences of the private equity industry for workers across the income distribution. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he completed an economics Ph.D. at Princeton University, was a predoctoral fellow at Opportunity Insights, and completed a B.A. in economics and physics at Bowdoin College.
Kassandra Hernandez
Kassandra Hernández is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Trained in labor economics and public finance, she studies how public policy exacerbates or mitigates inequality, particularly for low-wage workers and immigrants. Her work examines worker-led enforcement mechanisms—specifically, labor code violations, lawsuits, and subsequent impacts on workers and firms. Previously, Hernández was the inaugural research analyst at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Latino Policy and Politics Institute, where she led work on economic opportunity, (un)employment, and COVID-19 impacts on the Latino community. Her work has been covered in both English and Spanish media and was presented to members of the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Department of State. Hernández holds an M.P.P. and a B.A. in philosophy with a minor in labor and workplace studies, both from UCLA.
Micah Villarreal
Micah Villarreal is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her research, she seeks to understand the historical roots of present-day inequality in the United States. Her dissertation exploits a natural experiment in early 1900s Oklahoma to learn about the causes of racial wealth inequality. Previously, Villarreal worked on housing and labor policy research at Abt Associates. She holds a B.A. in international relations and economics from Wellesley College.
Neil Cholli
Neil Cholli is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Department of Economics. His primary fields of research are labor and public economics. Cholli’s work leverages applied microeconomic methods guided by theory to understand the mechanisms of social mobility and evaluate policies aimed at promoting it. He received his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in 2022 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and an Institute of Education Sciences Pre-Doctoral Fellow. His dissertation has been recognized by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and the National Tax Association.