Faculty

Andrew Hobbs studies how droughts, floods, and other disasters affect people, and develops tools to reduce the impact of climate change on farmers. He focuses in particular on how the costs of climate shocks are distributed within households. He is currently working on combining machine learning and satellite data for faster and more accurate detection of disasters and on insurance to sustain women's businesses through droughts in Northern Kenya.

Before entering academia, Andrew studied...

Professor Anttila-Hughes received his PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. His research focuses on understanding the social impacts of environmental processes, particularly those influenced by environmental degradation and climate change.

Professor Anttila-Hughes' current research areas include: public health impacts of the climate; behavioral responses to new information about environmental risks; and determinants of the spread of environmental attitudes and ideas.

Alessandra Cassar is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Economic Science Association and a former co-director of LEEPS Lab (Learning and Experimental Economics Projects of Santa Cruz) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MA in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan, in 1996, and her PhD in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2001.

Cassar is passionate...

Dr. Chakraborty received her PhD at the University of Minnesota. Her areas of specialization include: applied macroeconomics, international macroeconomics, international finance, and development economics. Dr. Chakraborty has published research articles in the Journal of International Business Studies, Economics Letters, and the Journal of World Economic Review.

Michael Jonas is from the University of California, Davis. His concentration area of specialization is monetary economics. He completed his doctorate degree at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Elizabeth Katz is a development economist with thirty years of experience conducting research on the intersection of gender and agricultural growth, demographic change, and public health policy and programming.  In her current role as Research Director at the Global Center for Gender Equality, she works closely with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, providing technical assistance to Program Officers and grantees to strengthen the gender intentionality of the foundation’s investment...

Professor Khachiyan studies the populations most exposed to aggregate industrial transitions, such as climate adaptation and automation. He uses data science methods, unconventional data sources, and leading methods in causal identification to inform current policy issues within these topics. Arman teaches in both the Undergraduate and Master's  Economics programs on topics including microeconomic principles, applied econometrics, and spatial economics.

Beyond academia, Arman has worked in...

Robizon Khubulashvili's research is at the intersection of theoretical, behavioral, and experimental microeconomics. A common question in his research is, how can we use a user's revealed preferences to improve the performance of online platforms? Robizon has studied this question in two settings: when monetary incentives are missing (an online gaming platform) and when monetary incentives are present (an online gambling platform). His work suggests that heterogeneity among users is an essential...

Man-Lui Lau received his PhD from Cornell University. His areas of specialization are microeconomics, macroeconomics, options and futures, mathematical economics and the economies of East Asia. Dr. Lau has published papers on the theory of economic growth and Asian economies. His current research includes the East and Southeast Asian economies, financial development and economic growth, and the theory of Real Options and it's application.

Professor Lorentzen specializes in the economics of information, incentives, and institutions. He received his PhD in Economic Analysis and Policy from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and previously taught at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. He has published research on governance and social control in China, media management, anti-corruption, environmental transparency, long-run economic growth, qualitative research methods, the creation of...

Areas of research specialization are in the use of econometric, experimental, and game-theoretic tools to analyze the impact of development programs. Professor Wydick's recent work examines the impact of development programs such as microfinance, child sponsorship, and in-kind donation of children's shoes, wheelchairs for the disabled, and clean wood-burning stoves. Other recent work studies the role of hope and aspirations in escaping poverty traps. His academic publications have appeared in...

Evan is a Senior Manager of Product Innovation at Netflix for Growth and Messaging Algorithms. He leads the development of machine learning algorithms that personalize the billions of emails and push notifications that Netflix sends every year. He specializes in the development of algorithms that measure the causal impact of customer experiences and then optimizes them. Prior to this role, he has five years of experience as a data scientist where he built fraud algorithms for Capital One and...

Lawrence De Geest is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Suffolk University and a Senior Data Scientist at Lyft. Professor De Geest’s academic research uses experiments, game theory and computational models to study institutional emergence and coordination problems that stem from misaligned incentives and private information. In his role at Lyft, Professor De Geest works on causal inference. Prior to joining Lyft, Professor De Geest was a Senior Data Scientist at the National Basketball...

Moonhawk Kim is the manager of inquiry, evaluation, and research at San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). In close collaboration with the district's leadership, he drives the organizational learning and the strategic planning based on data and research. Prior to his current role, Moonhawk was the director of research practice partnerships and community engagement at UC Berkeley's School of Education, where he built up the infrastructure for practitioners at Oakland Unified School...

Sandhya Patlolla has a PhD from University of California, Davis. Her research specialization is in the areas of economic development, agricultural economics, supply chain management, and lately, health economics. Dr. Patlolla’s current projects focus on measuring the impact of agricultural income support programs in India and evaluating the economic viability of breakthrough health care products.

Konrad Edward Ian Posch studies comparative political economy and regulatory politics with a particular focus on the politics of technology and regulation & governance (REGGOV). His dissertation examined the variety of ways regulators, innovators, and entrepreneurs co-create disruptive technological innovation in advanced industrial democracies. With a background in physics and mathematics, he also studies the deeper insights we can gain from qualitative and multi-method research and the...

Nihar Shah is the Head of Data Science at Mysten Labs, where he currently works on questions at the intersection of cryptocurrency and experimentation. He has also worked at Jump Crypto and on Meta's Libra/Diem project, as an economist. Prior to his work in cryptocurrency, he worked on experimentation projects, particularly for Meta's advertising and payments platforms. Nihar graduated from Harvard in 2018 with a PhD in Economics.

Kyle Woodward is a microeconomist specializing in game theory, auctions, and incentive design. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2015, and has previously taught courses on market design and strategic behavior at both UCLA and the University of North Carolina. In addition to maintaining an active research agenda, most recently taking microeconomic theory to topics in sustainability, he is currently employed at Gopuff as an expert on causal analysis and platform marketplace optimization.

Hartmut Fischer received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Fischer has a number of areas of specialization: international trade, international finance and development economics. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the European Union. Research interests include economic problems faced by countries in transition from socialist market economies, country risk analysis, issues of governance, the process of convergence vs. divergence between poor and rich...

Prof. Lehmann obtained his PhD from Cornell University and taught at the University of San Francisco in traditional and on-line venues. He is the author of The Irwin Guide To Using The Wall Street Journal, which sold 250,000 copies in seven editions. Prof. Lehmann also developed a popular seminar, Be Your Own Economist ®, on business and investment conditions, that he offers to investors, corporations and professional groups. The San Francisco media frequently interview Prof. Lehmann on current...

Charles N'cho-Oguie (N'cho) is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco (USF), where he taught macroeconomics, econometrics, and development macroeconomics for nearly two decades (1986–2005). Upon early retirement, Professor N'cho devoted the majority of his time to development work, especially in Africa. He has also spent more than 20 years working as a senior international consultant for the World Bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the United Nations...

John Veitch, Professor of Finance, and Director of the M.S. in Financial Analysis program, is an esteemed faculty member with over two decades of academic and chief administrative service to the university. Specializing in financial analysis and risk management, Dr. Veitch is the co-author of a number of articles on country risk in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa due to contributing factors of financial integration, currency devaluation and currency contagion. Professor Veitch served...