Ammar Farooq is an economist at Amazon. Prior, he was a data scientist II at Uber Technologies, as well as an economic analyst at Ernst & Young LLP. He completed both his M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from Georgetown University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Andrew Elrod
Andrew Elrod holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is a 2016 Washington Center for Equitable Growth grantee. Elrod, in the fall of 2021, completed his dissertation on the history of wage and price controls in the United States between 1940 and 1980. He works in the research department at UTLA, a 36,000-member public-sector labor union in Los Angeles.
Ann Bartel
Ann P. Bartel is the Merrill Lynch Professor of Workforce Transformation at Columbia University’s Columbia Business School and a member of the school’s economics division. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. Bartel is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has published numerous articles in the fields of labor economics and human resource management, studying employee training, job mobility, investments in human capital, the impact of workforce practices on productivity, and the impact of technological change on worker skills. Her current research includes studies of work-family policies and their impact on employers, worker careers, and children’s health.
Amir Sufi
Amir Sufi is the Bruce Lindsay Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as an associate editor for the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Sufi’s research focuses on finance and macroeconomics. He has articles published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His recent research on household debt and the economy has been profiled in The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. It has also been presented to policymakers at the Federal Reserve; the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This research forms the basis of his book, co-authored with Atif Mian, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014.
Sufi graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Solow Endowment Prize for Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching and Research. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2005.
Alex Xi He
Alex Xi He is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His primary research interest is in the area of empirical corporate finance including labor and finance, mergers and acquisitions, and entrepreneurship and innovation. He received his B.S. from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. from MIT.
Alexander Bartik
Alex Bartik is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include labor economics, public finance, and applied econometrics. His current research uses novel data sources to study the determinants of the labor market outcomes of less-educated workers. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. Before coming to MIT, he did policy research at the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and managed randomized controlled trials at Innovations for Poverty Action. He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and graduated from Yale College in 2008.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a visiting fellow at Equitable Growth. His teaching and research focuses on understanding the intersection between politics and markets in the United States, the politics of policy design, and labor policy. He is co-director of Columbia’s Labor Lab, which uses social science tools in partnership with labor organizations to build worker power.
Hertel-Fernandez recently returned to Columbia after serving in the Biden-Harris Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. While at the Department of Labor, he led research and evaluation to support policymaking, including launching initiatives to study and address disparities in access to Unemployment Insurance; build a research base to understand how to improve worker power and organizing across the federal government; and to better measure job quality. He also led the department’s implementation of President Joe Biden’s historic executive order on racial equity. At the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Hertel-Fernandez led efforts to expand public participation and community engagement in the regulatory process, reduce burdens in access to government benefits, and served as the lead handling White House review of regulations and forms related to nutrition and food assistance, support for underserved farmers, and rural development.
Hertel-Fernandez is the author or co-author of three books, including most recently The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (Cambridge, 2021, with Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen), which lays out a new framework for assessing the evolution of distinctive political and economic institutions in the United States in comparative perspective. His previous book, State Capture (Oxford, 2019), examined how wealthy donors, businesses and trade associations, and political entrepreneurs built cross-state organizations to reshape policy across the United States—with implications for democracy, accountability, inequality, and political representation. His first book, Politics at Work (Oxford, 2018), examined changing patterns of political mobilization in the workplace.
Hertel-Fernandez received his B.A. in political science from Northwestern University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University.
Alberto Bisin
Alberto Bisin is a professor of economics at New York University. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society. He is also a fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Experimental Social Sciences at NYU, IGIER at Bocconi University, CIREQ at the University of Montreal, and IZA at the University of Bonn. He is also a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the Center for the Economics of Human Development of the University of Chicago. He is associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory, of Economic Theory, and of Research in Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, obtained in 1994. He is founding editor of Noisefromamerika.org and op-ed contributor for La Repubblica (Italian daily). His main contributions are in the fields of general equilibrium theory, financial economics and macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and social economics. He is a co-editor of the Handbook of Social Economics.
Alex Bell
Alex Bell is an assistant professor in the Economics Department at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. His research, grounded in labor economics, focuses on inequality and innovation, with methodological contributions to the study of compensating differentials. His published work has appeared in top economics journals, including American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in computer science and economics from Brown University.
Adriana Kugler
Adriana Kugler is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She served as chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor during the Obama administration between 2011 and 2013, where she worked actively on developing policies and proposals on Unemployment Insurance, training programs, retirement benefits, overtime pay and minimum wages, immigration, disability insurance, and occupational safety regulations. Prior to Georgetown, she was full and associate professor in the Economics Departments at the University of Houston and University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Her research interests include labor markets and policy evaluation in developed and developing countries. Kugler earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and her joint B.A. in economics and political science from McGill University.