Current Cohort

The Stigler Center is happy to announce the cohort of its Affiliate Fellows program. This non-resident, 3-year appointment is designed to support the research of up-and-coming academics and strengthen and cultivate a community of scholars worldwide working on political economy, regulatory capture, and competitive markets. The Affiliate Fellows cohort is a multidisciplinary group, composed of economists, business scholars, lawyers and political scientists from multiple different backgrounds and jurisdictions.

Fellow Biographies

Emilie Aguirre
Associate Professor of Law, Duke University

Emilie Aguirre is a business law scholar whose research focuses on how companies pursue both social and financial goals. She is a professor at Duke Law School and has a secondary appointment at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Professor Aguirre uses field research methods at both startups and large multinational companies (including ethnography, participant observation, interviews, surveys, and archival research) to better understand these settings from the inside, and to better inform the legal and management frameworks needed to facilitate them at various stages of the business life cycle.  

Professor Aguirre was previously the Earl B. Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, where she taught and conducted research at the intersection of business law, management, and health and food systems. She has also been an Academic Fellow at the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and a Fulbright scholar and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge. Professor Aguirre earned her PhD in Management and Health Policy from Harvard Business School and her JD from Harvard Law School. She has also received an LLM from the University of Cambridge and an AB summa cum laude from Princeton University. During law school, Professor Aguirre worked in privacy law at Microsoft and in mergers and acquisitions and antitrust law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz. Before law school, she worked for an education and health nonprofit in the Dominican Republic as a Princeton in Latin America Fellow.

Jorge Alé-Chilet
Assistant Professor, Universidad de los Andes

Jorge Alé-Chilet is an economist at the School of Business and Economics of Universidad de los Andes, Chile. He specializes in industrial organization, with a particular focus on antitrust and regulation. Professor Alé-Chilet studies how firms in various industries, such as health-care, consumer packaged goods, and cars, behave strategically to achieve collusive outcomes or comply with regulation. His research has been funded by competitive grants from national science agencies in the US, Chile, and Israel. His papers have been published in leading economics and marketing journals. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2017 and was a post-doctoral fellow at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Pablo Balán
Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Tel Aviv University

Pablo Balán is a political economist studying developing countries, with a substantive focus on state capacity and social networks, a methodological focus on field experiments, and a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Balán studies how informal institutions affect the prospects and implementation of programmatic policy. A first stream of his research studies the foundations of state-building in low-capacity settings using field-experimental methods. Drawing on fieldwork in a large city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, these projects document how participation in informal institutions shape the adoption of land property rights and how local elites can collaborate with governments to boost essential state functions. A second set of projects examines the political effects of kinship ties in various contexts, from promoting electoral accountability to facilitating political activism within firms. His current research studies family ties as a source of the de facto power of economic elites.

Simcha Barkai
Assistant Professor of Finance, Boston College

Simcha Barkai is an assistant professor of finance at Boston College Carroll School of Management and a former Junior Fellow at the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research focuses on competition between firms in the U.S. and its impact on the macro economy, employment, and financial markets. His work on the decline in the labor share of income has been covered by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Nation. In ongoing work (supported by a grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth), Simcha is working with co-authors on researching the effects of Antitrust enforcement. 

Matthias Breuer
Associate Professor of Business, Columbia University

Matthias Breuer is an Associate Professor of Business in the Accounting Division of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He examines issues of corporate transparency and information verification, with a particular focus on the role of regulation in addressing corporate information issues. His research has been recognized with multiple awards, presented at leading universities and conferences, and published in top-tier accounting and finance journals.

Before joining Columbia University in 2018, Professor Breuer earned his PhD in Business from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He also holds a MSc in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics (United Kingdom) and a BSc in Business Administration from WHU—Otto Beisheim School of Management (Germany).

Chukwuma Dim
Assistant Professor of Finance, George Washington University

Chukwuma Dim is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the George Washington University. His research is at the intersection of empirical asset pricing, investor behavior, and the applications of machine learning and natural language processing in finance. He uses unstructured data to understand how people form beliefs, how asset prices incorporate new information, and to quantify relevant macro-finance variables that are difficult to measure using standard approaches. Chukwuma’s research has received multiple awards and has been presented at leading conferences.

Before joining George Washington University, Chukwuma obtained a Ph.D. in Finance from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germany. He has worked and consulted for institutions outside academia, including the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank.

Benjamin Carl Krag Egerod
Assistant Professor, Copenhagen Business School

Benjamin Carl Krag Egerod’s research examines the various roles that money plays in politics, with an emphasis on how individual firms engage in the political process. He is particularly interested in the role that social connections to politicians play in corporate lobbying. A large part of his research examines interactions between firms and the bureaucracy.

In his research, he draws on quantitative methods, and he has a strong focus on research design and quasi-experimental methods. Since most of the interactions he is interested in are extremely difficult to observe, he works with non-traditional forms of data (e.g. text), and often leverage data science techniques to analyze them. He is a former Junior Fellow at the Stigler Center.

Rafael Jiménez
Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Science Research Council

Rafael Jiménez obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2022. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Platforms Initiative of the Social Science Research Council and will join Bocconi University in 2023 as Assistant Professor in Economics. In the past, he worked in the Treasury and in the Central Bank of Mexico. In his work, he uses tools from behavioral economics, industrial organization, and political economy. His main research agenda focuses on the economics of social media, answering questions such as the impact of content moderation on user behavior and welfare.

Kobi Kastiel
Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University

Kobi Kastiel is an Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Program on Corporate Governance and a Lecturer of Law at Harvard Law School. Kastiel earned his S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where he served as a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics in all years of study, and as a Research Director at the Program on Corporate Governance. He also holds an LL.B. degree (magna cum laude) and B.A. degree in economics from Tel Aviv University. Prior to joining the academia, he practiced for four years in the corporate group of a top New York law firm, and clerked on the Israeli Supreme Court.

Kastiel teaches and researches in the fields of corporate law and corporate governance, with a particular focus on public companies with controlling shareholders, shareholder activism and stakeholder governance. In his research, he examines and analyzes the use of control-enhancing mechanisms by companies’ founders, structural biases of independent directors, existing obstacles to shareholder activism and potential ways to mitigate them, and the failure of corporate leaders to look after stakeholder interests. He has published over 20 articles in leading U.S. law journals (including in Yale Law Journal, Chicago Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review and Southern California Law Review), and he is the recipient of a number of research awards and scholarships, including, most recently, the Tzeltner Prize for an outstanding young legal scholar in Israel.

Aneil Kovvali
Associate Professor, Indiana University

Aneil Kovvali is an associate professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. Professor Kovvali’s research focuses on corporate law and governance. He addresses questions about the interaction between corporate governance and the function of political institutions, stakeholderism and ESG, and corporate governance’s interaction with labor law and policy. His articles and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review, among other publications.

Prior to joining the Maurer School of Law faculty, Professor Kovvali was a Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.  He previously worked as a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.  He clerked with the Honorable Christopher F. Droney for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Barton Lee
Assistant Professor, ETH Zurich

Barton Lee is an Assistant Professor and Chair of Political Economy and eDemocracy at ETH Zürich. His research focuses on the role of political institutions in fostering a well-functioning and effective democracy. He is interested in understanding voters’ frustrations and dissatisfaction with democratic processes and, in turn, how political institutions can be improved to address these frustrations and deliver a more effective and resilient democracy.

Within this research agenda, he has written on a range of topics such as legislative bargaining & gridlock in the U.S. Congress, political accountability issues, democratic backsliding & populism, and ranked-choice voting. His work has been published in leading economic outlets: Review of Economic Studies; Journal of Public Economics; Games and Economic Behavior; Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations; Social Choice and Welfare. Prior to joining ETH Zürich in 2022, Barton was a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford; he obtained his PhD in Economics from UNSW Sydney in 2021. During 2018 and 2019, Barton was a visiting PhD student and fellow at Harvard University.

Felix Montag
Assistant Professor, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Felix Montag is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Group at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on studying the determinants and effects of competition by combining theoretical models with econometric methods for structural estimation and causal inference. His work spans several topics, ranging from trading-off the effects of product market mergers on workers and consumers to studying the effects of a lack of price transparency on competition and commodity tax pass-through.

Anya Nakhmurina
Assistant Professor of Accounting, Yale University

Anya Nakhmurina's research interests revolve around financial reporting, governance, and monitoring. Her work explores these topics in the context of U.S. local governments and municipal markets.  She also studies the role of institutional investors and shareholder activism.

Nakhmurina earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Additionally, she holds M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Outside of academia, she worked in venture capital and in equity research.

Marcus Painter
Assistant Professor of Finance, Saint Louis University

Marcus Painter is an assistant professor of finance in the Chaifetz School of Business, a Research Associate of the Taylor Geospatial Institute, and a fellow of the Research Institute at Saint Louis University. His research uses novel sources of data such as satellite imagery and geospatial foot traffic to study open questions in financial markets, municipal finance, and political economics. Professor Painter’s research has been published in well regarded academic journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Public Economics and has been cited in numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and The Washington Post, among others.  Prior to his academic career, Marcus worked in wealth management. Painter earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Missouri and his Ph.D. in finance from the University of Kentucky

Bruno Pellegrino
Assistant Professor of Finance, Columbia University

Bruno Pellegrinohas very recently joined Columbia Business School, from the University of Maryland, as an Assistant Professor of Finance. Professor Pellegrino’s research agenda revolves around two big themes: one is the intersection of Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics. In this field, Professor Pellegrino is developing new methods to understand economy-wide changes in product market competition, productivity and market power. His other research interest is International Finance and Macroeconomics. In this field, Bruno is studying global capital allocation and the macroeconomic consequences of Financial Globalization.

Professor Pellegrino is also affiliated with CESifo, received his PhD from UCLA, and holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Bocconi University. His research received awards from several institutions, including the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, the Western Finance Association, and the American Law and Economics Association.

Krisztina Orbán
Assistant Professor, Monash University

Krisztina is an applied economist working on the economics of structural change induced by large political events. Her research focuses on how the firm sector adjusts to such large political shocks. In terms of geographic areas she has worked on Eastern Europe, South Africa, South Korea, and the US.

Krisztina graduated with a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She started as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2022 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Christina Parajon Skinner
Assistant Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Christina Parajon Skinner is an expert on financial regulation, money, and central banks. Her research pursues questions surrounding central bank mandates, the financial markets, separation-of-powers, and the corporate governance of banks. Professor Skinner’s work is international and comparative in scope, drawing on her experience as an academic and central bank lawyer in the United Kingdom. Her research has been published in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among other leading academic journals. Professor Skinner has also contributed to financial regulatory policy working groups, including those convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Financial Stability Board, and the U.K. Banking Standards Board.

Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served as legal counsel at the Bank of England, in the Financial Stability Division of the Bank’s Legal Directorate. Previously, Professor Skinner was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, Law Department. From 2014-2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School.  Professor Skinner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a concentration in international economics.  She received certificates of proficiency in European Politics and Society, and Spanish Language and Culture.

Prateek Raj
Assistant Professor in Strategy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Prateek is an Assistant Professor in Strategy at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). He studies how free and inclusive markets evolve(d) in history, and in developing countries. Such markets – that bring together parties at arm’s length – are neither spontaneous, nor self-sustaining. They need a set of supporting conditions and institutions to function, in the absence of which traditional relationship and identity based institutions persist, limiting opportunities especially for the historically marginalized.

Prateek’s research has been featured in journals and the popular press, including Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bloomberg, and VoxEU. Prateek has been a recipient of several prestigious grants including the ESRC-UKRI-ICSSR grant on studying the future UK-India trade and the role of networks in facilitating them, and a grant from the Government of Uttar Pradesh, India for studying the spontaneous organization of Kumbh Mela in 2019. Prateek earned his doctorate from University College London (UCL) in 2018, and his undergrad from Indian Institute Technology Delhi in 2010. During his PhD, he was affiliated to the Center for Economic History and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (2015-2018) as a Visiting Predoctoral fellow and the Stigler Centre as a Research Associate (2016-2018).

Andrey Simonov
Gary Winnick and Martin Granoff Associate Professor of Business, Columbia University

Andrey Simonov is a Gary Winnick and Martin Granoff Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Economics of Columbia University, and a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His research work is in the areas of quantitative marketing, empirical industrial organization, and political economy, and focuses on digital and media markets, such as news, advertising, and video games. In the 2022-2023 academic year, Andrey was visiting Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow.

Suhas Sridharan
Assistant Professor of Accounting, Emory University

Suhas A. Sridharan is an assistant professor at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. She holds a PhD in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Before joining Emory, she served on the faculty of the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Professor Sridharan’s academic work focuses on the flow of information in capital markets. She is interested in understanding how innovations in financial markets affect the assessment of firm risk and resolution of investor uncertainty in the price discovery process. Her recent work investigates the role of information in assessing and mitigating firm risks arising from an increasingly polarized political system. Her research has been featured in popular media, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg News.

Jan Stuckatz
Assistant Professor in Business and Government, Copenhagen Business School

Jan Stuckatz is an Assistant Professor in Business and Government at Copenhagen Business School. Previously, he held post-doc positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and Humboldt University Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. at the Government department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research aims to answer how money in politics and corporate lobbying affect politics and economic activity. While influence channels such as lobbying, donations, and employee political activities are often treated in isolation, his work focuses on the complementarities and strategic coordination of firms’ political strategies. He applies computational methods as well as observational and experimental causal inference to analyse big data on individual and corporate political activity.

Jan’s research agenda focuses on the comparative political economy of money in politics and corporate political influence. First, he uses big data on U.S. individual and corporate donations to investigate the causes and consequences of political alignment between firms and employees. Second, he researches corporate political activity in Germany, collecting novel data on lobbying and individual lobbyists. In addition, he uses cross-country survey experiments to study public preferences for political disclosure, and to assess the impact of interest groups’ public communications on citizens. Third, he links cross-country lobbying data to investigate how multinational corporations lobby across jurisdictions. Last, Jan uses longitudinal data from historic denazification questionnaires distributed after World War II in Germany, to find out what life events led individuals to support the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Anna Tzanaki
Senior Lecturer, Lund University

Anna Tzanaki is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University, Faculty of Law (Sweden), and Senior Research Fellow at UCL Centre of Law, Economics & Society (UK). She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics (Oxford) and Competition Policy International (Boston). Anna studied law at University College London (PhD), University of Chicago (LLM), University of Athens (LLB) and Humboldt University Berlin (Erasmus). She was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Law School and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Her research focuses on competition law and policy, corporate governance, law & economics, EU and comparative law and as of late, the regulation and governance of digital platforms. She has received prestigious research grants by the European Commission and the Swedish Competition Authority to investigate the competition implications of common ownership and comparative law and economic aspects of competition compliance programs. Anna has also advised as an independent academic expert the Hellenic Competition Commission and has contributed to two external scientific reports undertaken for the European Commission (DG COMP) on minority shareholdings and ex post merger evaluations. During her time as an Affiliate Fellow at the Stigler Center, she will research the newly emerging challenges for digital platform regulation and data governance by shedding light on the tension between private property (rights and incentives) and public governance (duties and constraints) and on the broader distributional consequences and value choices these rights and duties may entail in different jurisdictions. The aim is to better understand the role of markets, law, and politics in the digital era in comparative light.

Silvia Vannutelli
Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Silvia Vannutelli is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Department of Economics and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. In her research, she uses original and administrative data and rigorous empirical methods to answer policy-relevant questions. Her research focuses on core topics in public economics, that pertain to the collection of revenues and the allocation of government resources, the design of social insurance policies, and the role of institutions and political economy considerations in policy making. Before joining Northwestern, she received her PhD in Economics from Boston University and a Masters’ Degree from the University of Rome Tor Vergata.