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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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.
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.
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.