Our Team

Greg Kaplan is the Alvin H. Baum Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. His research spans macroeconomics, monetary economics, labor economics and applied microeconomics. He has published extensively on the topics of inequality, risk sharing, unemployment, household formation, migration, fiscal policy and monetary policy. Kaplan currently serves as the Lead Editor of Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics and was previously an Editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He is also the Co-founder and Chairman of e61 Institute, a non-partisan economic research institute in Australia, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and an Economic Consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Kaplan received a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2015 and was awarded the Central Banking Prize for Economics in Central Banking in 2019 for his paper “Monetary Policy According to HANK,” co-authored with Ben Moll and Gianluca Violante. He received his PhD from New York University in 2009. 

John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. His research includes over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published textbooks. Previous to The Voltage Effect, he co-authored the international best seller, The Why Axis, in 2013. His research focuses on combining field experiments with economic theory to deepen our understanding of the economic science. In the early 1990s, List pioneered field experiments as a methodology for testing behavioral theories and learning about behavioral principles that are shared across different domains. To obtain data for his field experiments, List has made use of several different markets, including charitable fundraising activities, the sports trading card industry, the ride-share industry, and the education sector, to highlight a few. This has led to collaborative work with several different schools and charities, as well as firms including: Lyft, Uber, United Airlines, Virgin Airlines, Humana, Sears, Kmart, Facebook, Google, General Motors, Tinder, Citadel, Walmart, and several non-profits. List was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. List received the 2010 Kenneth Galbraith Award, the 2008 Arrow Prize for Senior Economists for his research in behavioral economics in the field, and was the 2012 Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize recipient. He is a current Editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

Robert Shimer is the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, where has been a faculty member since 2003. Shimer is widely recognized for his contributions to labor economics and macroeconomics, focusing on search frictions, labor market mismatches, and unemployment dynamics. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, an Economic Theory Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in Labor Economics. In recent years, he has consulted for the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Chicago and held leadership roles including co-chairing the NBER’s Economic Fluctuations and Growth Macro Perspectives Group, serving as head editor of the Journal of Political Economy, and chairing the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. His work has been published in top journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and Journal of Political Economy. Shimer earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.

Steve Levitt is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. He is the Co-Founder of The Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC) and he directs the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. Levitt co-authored Freakonomics, which spent over 2 years on the New York Times Best Seller list and has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. SuperFreakonomics, released in 2009, includes brand new research on topics from terrorism to prostitution to global warming. Levitt is also the co-author of the popular Freakonomics Blog.

Tali Griffin is passionate about scaling academic impact beyond the walls of campus and is a seasoned program developer, marketer, fundraiser, and strategic leader. She brings nearly 20 years of experience in higher education administration, much of which was spent at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in the Office of Advancement and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation.

John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. His research includes over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published textbooks. Previous to The Voltage Effect, he co-authored the international best seller, The Why Axis, in 2013. His research focuses on combining field experiments with economic theory to deepen our understanding of the economic science. In the early 1990s, List pioneered field experiments as a methodology for testing behavioral theories and learning about behavioral principles that are shared across different domains. To obtain data for his field experiments, List has made use of several different markets, including charitable fundraising activities, the sports trading card industry, the ride-share industry, and the education sector, to highlight a few. This has led to collaborative work with several different schools and charities, as well as firms including: Lyft, Uber, United Airlines, Virgin Airlines, Humana, Sears, Kmart, Facebook, Google, General Motors, Tinder, Citadel, Walmart, and several non-profits. List was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. List received the 2010 Kenneth Galbraith Award, the 2008 Arrow Prize for Senior Economists for his research in behavioral economics in the field, and was the 2012 Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize recipient. He is a current Editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

Christina is a development economist, focusing on labor markets, education and health. She is an Assistant Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Her work studies the effect of personnel policies (pay, monitoring, training, management) on employee productivity and sorting in low-income countries. In particular, she studies how certain personnel policies affect teacher effort and turnover, and, ultimately, student learning and how certain policies contribute to or help mitigate discrimination against female and low socio-economic status employees. She uses primarily experimental methods in partnership with school districts, firms and governments. Her work has been funded numerous organizations, including the National Science Foundation, JPAL, DFID, and the Spencer Foundation. She earned a BA in political science and physics from University of California, Los Angeles, a MALD from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a PhD in Economics from University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a consultant for Save the Children and the World Bank, and before graduate school was a high school physics teacher. Prior to joining the Economics department, she was a Saieh Family Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago.

Angela Doku is an applied microeconomist who specializes in environmental, development, and behavioural economics. She is an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and a former postdoctoral scholar in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Angela is also affiliated with the John Mitchell Economics of Poverty Lab in Australia National University. Previously, Angela worked as an Economist at the ILO, and for organizations such as GIZ, DFID, and the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Angela completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Geneva; an MA in Economics at the University of Toronto; an MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a BA Specialized Honors in Economics at York University.

Min Sok Lee is an Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in Economics in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, at the University of Chicago, teaching undergraduate courses in principles of microeconomics, intermediate microeconomics, behavioral and experimental economics. His primary research interests are behavioral/experimental economics, the economics of education (in particular, early childhood education) and pedagogy (what are the characteristics of highly successful pedagogies in economics courses in high school and college?). He also spent six years leading the Kenneth and Anne Griffin Foundation, developing and implementing their philanthropic vision with over $15 million in investments made in early childhood education and K-12 education working in partnership with researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Leveraging this experience, he consults with non-profit organizations and foundations. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Cambridge (U.K.), and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

Yana Gallen is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She graduated from Northwestern University with a PhD in Economics in 2016. Her research focuses on the impact of motherhood on women’s careers. Her peer-reviewed work is published in Journal of the European Economic Association, Labour Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Economics Letters, and currently under revision for the Review of Economic Studies and the America Economic Review. Much of this research uses Nordic administrative data. Gallen is a member of the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA), a past committee member for the Society of Labor Economics meetings, and a current organizer of the Women in Empirical Microeconomics Conference. Beyond academic impact, Gallen’s research on the labor market impacts of motherhood has been featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Vox and Bloomberg, and she has been a guest on National Public Radio as well as the University of Chicago podcast the Pie on multiple occasions.

Andrew Simon is an assistant professor in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and a former postdoctoral scholar in Economics at the University of Chicago under Professor John List. His research focuses on issues in state and local public finance and labor economics, with a particular interest in higher education policy and taxation.

Chad Syverson is the George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001. His research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. Syverson has authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly articles and is the coauthor (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) of intermediate-level textbook, Microeconomics. Syverson is a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, has served on multiple National Academies committees, and currently sits on the Census Bureau Scientific Advisory Committee. He teaches classes in competitive strategy and industrial organization. Syverson received a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2001. Before that, he earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and mechanical engineering from the University of North Dakota in 1996.

Faith Fatchen is Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, working with Professor John List on projects in education and labor. She graduated from California State University Chico in 2022 with a B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Mathematics.

Uditi Karna is an Economics PhD student at Columbia University interested in behavioral/experimental, development, and education. She is currently researching racial and parental education-based excellence gaps, incentives for overcoming procrastination, and transforming gender attitudes in rural Nepal. Uditi received her AB in Economics with a specialization in Data Science from the University of Chicago in 2020, after which she worked under Professor John List as a pre-doctoral research professional. She is originally from Princeton, New Jersey.

Faisal Kattan holds master’s degrees in Economics (University of Chicago), Arab Studies with a focus on Political Economy and Economic Development (Georgetown University), and Economics and Public Policy (LSE), as well as a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance (American University in Cairo). He is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, working with Professor John List on field experiments and behavioral research in Saudi Arabia, and serves as a part-time Advisor to the Minister of Economy and Planning.

Lina Ramirez Leguizamon is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on development economics and political economy, with a particular emphasis on the migration dynamics of disadvantaged populations and the impact of education programs in developing settings.

Rohen Shah is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, specializing in Behavioral, Labor, and Experimental Economics. His previous experiences include being a math teacher, running a state-wide tutoring company in Michigan, and co-founding an ed tech company.