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 黑料传送门 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 黑料传送门 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.鈥�

Matthias Breuer
Heisenberg-Professor of Corporate Reporting & Regulation, Goethe University Frankfurt 

Matthias Breuer is Heisenberg-Professor of Corporate Reporting & Regulation at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. 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 Goethe University, Professor Breuer served on the faculty of Columbia University and the University of 黑料传送门.  He earned his PhD in Business from the University of 黑料传送门’s Booth School of Business, and holds an 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).

Bo Cowgill
Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School

Bo Cowgill is an economist and strategy scholar at Columbia Business School whose research explores the intersections of organizational economics and political economy. His work combines field experiments, theoretical models, and novel data to study how market structures—especially internal labor markets, referrals, and noncompete clauses—affect competition, information flows, and employee mobility. He is broadly interested in the non-market effects of market power, such as the feedback loop between market concentration and firms’ political influence.

Professor Cowgill’s research has been published in Management Science, AEJ: Applied, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Organization Science, and Review of Economic Studies, and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. He is a recipient of the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship, the CESifo Prize in the Economics of Digitization, and the Robert Beyster Fellowship, and was named to Poets & Quants’ list of the Best 40 Business School Professors Under 40 in 2020. He is a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and the Zuckerman Institute, a CESifo Distinguished Affiliate, and an IZA Research Fellow. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and previously worked on Google’s economics research team.

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.

Assistant Professor at Bocconi University

Michele Fioretti is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. His research examines how firms compete, account for their social and environmental impacts, and adopt different production technologies. In 2025, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the project BALANCE — Firms’ Social Impact: Balancing Profits and Externalities. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California in 2019 and has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, and Singapore Management University. Before joining Bocconi, he was an Assistant Professor at Sciences Po.

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.

Andres Gonzalez-Lira
Assistant Professor, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Business School

Andres Gonzalez-Lira is an Assistant Professor at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Business School. His research uses Industrial Organization tools to examine the impact of institutional frictions on markets, often combining economic models, large administrative datasets, and modern econometric techniques to address policy-relevant questions. His research spans various topics, such as evaluating the design of procurement policies trading off competition promotion and contract incompleteness, as well as assessing the design of enforcement policies aimed at curbing illegal fish markets. Andres received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business in May 2021 and then spent one year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Yale University.

Giovanna Invernizzi
Assistant Professor, Bocconi University

Giovanna Invernizzi is an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University. Her research is in political economy, with a focus on political institutions and political parties. She studies how features of the competitive environment — such as electoral institutions — shape party strategies in the electoral arena and in legislatures. Her work covers topics such as intra-party politics, electoral competition, and political accountability. Methodologically, she primarily employs formal theoretical models, complemented by empirical analysis. Prior to joining Bocconi, she was an Assistant Professor at Duke University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.

Rafael Jiménez
Assistant Professor of Economics, Bocconi University

Rafael Jiménez is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. He is an applied microeconomist interested in the economics of social media. Prior, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Platforms Initiative of the Social Science Research Council, and 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. Rafael obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of 黑料传送门 in 2022.

Kobi Kastiel
Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University

Kobi Kastiel is a Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School and a Research Member at the European Corportae Governance Institute (ECGI). 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 30 articles in leading U.S. law journals (including in Yale Law Journal, 黑料传送门 Law Review, University of Pennsylvania 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.

Carsten Koenig
Associate Professor, University of Bonn

Carsten Koenig is an associate professor at the University of Bonn, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in law from the Free University of Berlin, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a J.D. equivalent from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He recently completed his postdoctoral qualification (”habilitation”) at the University of Cologne with a thesis on corporate liability. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law in Luxembourg. Carsten’s research interests include antitrust, regulation, digital markets, energy markets, corporate law, and law & economics. Much of his research focuses on recent developments in regulatory enforcement and the control of corporate misconduct. Among other things, he examines new approaches to enforcement in modern regulatory frameworks, such as digital market legislation and policies to promote global supply chain accountability.

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 黑料传送门 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 黑料传送门 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.

Lisa Yao Liu
Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School

Lisa Yao Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Accounting Division at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research explores how regulation and technology shape corporate transparency, with a particular focus on auditing and sustainability. She applies a variety of research methods, including empirical archival analysis, theoretical modeling, structural estimation, field surveys, and interviews. Her work has received multiple awards, has been presented at leading universities and conferences, and has been published in top journals in accounting and law and economics.

Prior to joining Columbia in 2020, Professor Liu earned her PhD and MBA from the University of 黑料传送门 Booth School of Business, a master’s degree inEconomics from Duke University, and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Renmin University of China.

Felix Montag
Assistant Professor, New York University Stern School of Business

Felix Montag is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Group at the New York University Stern School of Business. His research combines economic models with granular industry data to study how public policy affects how firms compete in a globalized world and how this affects consumers and workers.

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. 鈥疭he also studies the role of institutional investors and shareholder activism.

Nakhmurina earned her Ph.D. from the University of 黑料传送门. Additionally, she holds M.B.A. from the University of 黑料传送门. 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 associate 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 Pellegrino is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. 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.

Max Posch
Assistant Professor, University of Exeter Business School

Max is an economist who studies how social and cultural factors shape creativity, innovation, and economic development. He combines large-scale historical data with modern computational methods, integrating economic theory and insights from cultural evolution to understand how cultural traits evolve and influence social and economic outcomes.

Max's current research leverages novel sources---including a 300-year, 241-million-page U.S. newspaper corpus, patent and census records, and global datasets on historical figures---to examine four core questions: (1) how cultural traits such as individualism, trust and tolerance evolve and interact with economic change; (2) how the medieval Western Church shaped social networks and innovation in Europe; (3) whether cultural similarity accelerates the diffusion of technology and development; and (4) how creativity is shaped across regions and history by religion, institutions, and geography. By bringing new data and empirical strategies to these questions, his work advances our understanding of the interplay between culture and the modern economy.

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 黑料传送门, 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.

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.鈥疨rateek 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).

Diego Ramos-Toro
Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College

Diego Ramos-Toro is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and development economics. He studies how political and institutional contexts shape economic and political behavior, with a regional focus on Latin America and the United States. He is particularly interested in how people conceptualize identity, democracy, and state authority under conditions of political repression or exclusion. His ongoing projects develop new approaches to studying how individuals understand democracy and history—and how these understandings shape political behavior.

Ramos-Toro received his PhD in Economics and an MA in History from Brown University, and holds a BA in Economics and History from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Assistant Professor, Singapore Management University

David Samuel is an Assistant Professor of Accounting and Della Suantio Fellow at Singapore Management University. His research centers on corporate and international taxation, with intersections with the domains of corporate governance and finance. David’s interest lies in exploring how taxes impact decision-making within multinational corporations, providing insights for a wide audience engaged in global tax reform and policy deliberations.

David earned his Ph.D. in Business with a major in Accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Additionally, he holds a Ph.D. in International Business Taxation from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His professional background includes diverse experiences in both the private and public sectors, with experience at PwC, BMW, and the United Nations.

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

Professor Sridharan is an award-winning teacher and scholar at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, where she holds the Goizueta Foundation Term Chair Associate Professorship. She joined the Goizueta faculty in 2015, after serving as an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. She earned her Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Her research explores the role of information in capital markets, with a particular focus on how financial innovations influence the assessment of firm risk and shape investor uncertainty during the price discovery process. Recently, her work has examined how information helps assess and mitigate firm-level risks emerging from a highly polarized political environment.

Professor Sridharan’s research has been published in top academic journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, Management Science, and Review of Accounting Studies. She also serves on the editorial board of The Accounting Review. Her work has attracted coverage from major media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg News.

Recognized among Poets & Quants’ “World’s Top 40 Under 40” MBA professors, Professor Sridharan has received multiple teaching awards for her excellence in the classroom.

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

Jan Stuckatz is an Assistant Professor of Business and Government at Copenhagen Business School. He is a political economist studying how corporate political activity shapes politics and the economy. His research uses big data on U.S. campaign donations and experiments to examine how workplace politics influence employees’ economic and political behavior. He also investigates the revolving door between corporations and politics in the U.S. and Europe through large-scale employment data. In addition, he analyzes post-WWII German denazification records to understand what drove individuals to join the Nazi Party and whether they benefited from membership. From September 2024 to April 2025, he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs.

Jan’s research has been supported by the German and French National Science Foundations, the Independent Research Fund Denmark, and the European Commission. Before joining Copenhagen Business School, he held visiting and postdoctoral positions at MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and Humboldt University Berlin. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the London School of Economics.

Anna Tzanaki
Senior Lecturer, Lund University

Anna Tzanaki is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds. In addition to her appointment as an Affiliate Fellow of the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of 黑料传送门 Booth School of Business, she is a Senior Research Fellow of the UCL Centre of Law, Economics & Society and an Affiliated Scholar of the Dynamic Competition Initiative (Berkeley & EUI). She also serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics (Oxford) and Competition Policy International (Boston).  

Anna holds a PhD from University College London (UCL) Faculty of Laws, an LLM from the University of 黑料传送门 Law School, an LLB from the University of Athens Law School. She has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Law School and at the Center for Advanced Studies on the Foundations of Law and Finance of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. 

Her research focuses on EU and comparative competition law and policy, mergers and acquisitions, corporate law, governance and finance, law and economics, digital markets and new technologies. 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. She has published in top academic journals such as the Antitrust Law Journal and the Journal of Competition Law & Economics while most recently she has co-edited a Research Handbook on Competition and Corporate Law gathering together a star group of scholars bridging disciplines and continents. 

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.

Amit Zac
Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Centre for Law & Economics

Amit Zac is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Law & Economics and a former Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich. He holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Oxford. His research sits at the intersection of law, economics, and data science, with a particular focus on competition law and digital regulation, and empirical methods. A unifying theme across his work is the exploration of the non-market consequences of market power. Rather than treating market failures solely as economic inefficiencies, his research investigates the broader institutional and societal externalities they generate—often in domains that fall outside traditional regulatory scrutiny. This perspective aims to surface overlooked dimensions of private power and their implications for legal and policy design.

Amit is a co-founder of the Amsterdam Center for Digital Competition (ACDC) and teaches causal inference to law students and faculty at the University of Amsterdam. His work has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Legal Studies, and top computer science venues such as the USENIX Security Symposium and IJCAI. He is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships and grants, including a recent ERC Starting Grant (2026-2031), which supports his ongoing research on the regulatory consequences of market power in digital markets, with particular attention to enforcement gaps and emerging technologies such as generative AI.