Staff Directory

Tunku Varadarajan is a contributing writer at The Wall Street Journal, where he was previously the Op-Ed Editor. He is also a contributing editor at POLITICO and professor at New York University’s Department of Journalism. He recently served as Editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and has held editorial positions at Newsweek International, Forbes and The Times of London. Before embarking on his journalism career, he was a Lecturer in Law at Trinity College, Oxford University. He holds a Law degree from Oxford University.

Sheila Dow is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and Convener of the Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology. Her main academic focus has been on raising methodological awareness in the fields of macroeconomics, money and banking, and the history of economic thought (especially Hume, Smith and Keynes). While her career has primarily been in academia, she has a policy background from positions with the Bank of England and the Government of Manitoba, and latterly as a special advisor on monetary policy to the UK Treasury Select Committee. She has held positions with a range of academic organisations, such as Chair of the International Network for Economic Method. Recent books include Economic Methodology: An Inquiry, OUP 2002, A History of Scottish Economic Thought, Routledge 2006, co-edited with Alexander Dow, and Open Economics, Routledge 2009, co-edited with Richard Arena and Matthias Klaes.

Richard Robb is CEO of Christofferson, Robb and Company (CRC), a New York- and London-based fund management company that invests in asset backed securities and renewable energy assets in Europe and emerging markets. He is also Professor of Professional Practice in International Finance at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, where he teaches courses in microeconomics, economic foundations of capital markets and finance.

Before co-founding CRC, he was the global head of the derivatives and securities subsidiaries of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Ltd. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

Rebecca Berlow is editor and chief of Capitalism and Society. She studied philosophy and law at Columbia. Her professional interests focused on the legal aspects of economic activity. Ms. Berlow served as legal counsel for major investment banks and private investment firms, advising in the areas of securities, finance, and business law. She currently does pro bono work in family law, public benefits, and immigration, and serves as an arbitrator and mediator with various financial and charitable organizations. Ms. Berlow has edited works by philosophers and economists, and participated in conferences on law and financial institutions.

Peter Pazzaglini received his Ph.D. with distinction in medieval legal history from Columbia University. As a Senior Scholar at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, he has taught undergraduates in the Columbia Core for many years as well as advanced, interdisciplinary seminars in the Humanities. He has been consistently rated among the top University instructors. In addition, he has been a consultant in legal history to the Library of Congress, worked as a Canon Law Fellow for the Vatican Library Project at the School of Law of the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the prestigious St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire.

Selected publications include seminal books and reference works in European history, Roman and Canon Law. Awards include Distinguished Service to the Core at Columbia, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, National Endowment and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. He has reviewed for NEH, acted as a trustee of the Stonewall Community Foundation, and served as an academic interpreter at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. At present, he is on the Advisory Boards of Community Impact and the Heyman Center Colloquia Series at Columbia University.

Lawrence H. Summers is President Emeritus and Charles W. Eliot Professor of Harvard University. He has served in a series of senior public policy positions, including Director of the National Economic Council for the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2011, and Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2001. He received his bachelor of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute.  A recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001 and received that university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's work focuses on income distribution, risk, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books, and several bestsellers. His most recent titles are Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited, The Euro, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy and The Great Divide.

Jeffrey Sachs serves as Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is University Professor at Columbia University, the university’s highest academic rank. During 2002 to 2016, he served as Director of the Earth Institute. Sachs is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals, and previously advised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on both the Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development Goals and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.

Gylfi Zoega is a Professor of Economics at the University of Iceland, a part-time professor at Birkbeck College at the University of London and an External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland.  He has published numerous articles on macroeconomics and labor economics, which appear in the American Economic Review, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and the Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Glenn Hubbard is dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School. Hubbard received his BA and BS degrees summa cum laude from the University of Central Florida and also holds a PhD degree in economics from Harvard University.  

In addition to writing more than 100 scholarly articles in economics and finance, Glenn is the author of three popular textbooks, as well as co-author of The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers From Ancient Rome to Modern America, and Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System. 

From 2001 until 2003, he was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers.  In the corporate sector, he is on the boards of ADP, BlackRock Closed-End Funds, and MetLife.

George Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD in 1966, the same year he became an assistant professor at Berkeley. He became a full professor in 1978. Professor Akerlof is a 2001 recipient of the Alfred E. Nobel Prize in Economic Science; he was honored for his theory of asymmetric information and its effect on economic behavior. He is also the 2006 president of the American Economic Association. He served earlier as vice president and member of the executive committee. He is also on the North American Council of the Econometric Association.

Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics, is Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and Chairman of the Editorial Board for its journal. Born in 1933, he spent his childhood in Chicago and, from age six, grew up in Hastings-on Hudson, N.Y. He attended public schools, earned his B.A. from Amherst (1955) and got his Ph.D. at Yale (1959). After a stint at RAND, he held positions at Yale and its Cowles Foundation (1960 - 1966), a professorship at Penn and finally at Columbia in 1971. He has written books on growth, unemployment theory, recessions, stagnation, inclusion, rewarding work, dynamism, indigenous innovation and the good economy.

His work can be seen as a lifelong project to put “people as we know them” into economic theory. In the mid-‘60s to the early ‘80s, beginning with the “Phelps volume,” Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory(1970), he pointed out that workers, customers and companies must make many decisions without full or current information; and they improvise by forming expectations to fill in for the missing information. In that framework, he studied wage-setting, mark-up rules, slow recoveries and over-shooting. This served to underpin Keynesian tenet that say a cut in the money supply will not merely cause prices and wages to drop with no prolonged effect on employment.

From the mid-‘80s to the late ‘90s, he put aside the short-termism and monetarism of MIT and Chicago to develop a “structuralist” macroeconomics. Contrary to what Keynesian extremists see as unending and unexplained deficiency of “demand,” he sees employment heading to its “natural” level and seeks to explain the effects of structural forces on it.  His book Structural Slumps (1994) and later papers with Hian Teck Hoon and Gylfi Zoega find an economy’s natural employment level is contracted by increases in household wealth, in overseas interest rates and by currency weakness.  Thus, the big job losses in the US, UK and France result from the pile-up of wealth and puny investment, both stemming from the slowdown of productivity growth.

Now he has worked to put economics on a new foundation. Powerful innovation over more than a century alters the nature of the advanced economies: Having higher income or wealth matters less. As his book Rewarding Work (1997) begins to argue, what matters more are non-material rewards of work: being engaged in projects, the delight of succeeding at something and the experience of flourishing on an unfolding voyage. His book Mass Flourishing (2013) remarks that cavemen had the ability to imagine new things and the zeal to create them. But a culture liberating and inspiring the dynamism is necessary to ignite a “passion for the new.”

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. A well-known economist, historian and rhetorician, she has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. With Stephen Ziliak in 2008 she wrote The Cult of Statistical Significance (University of Michigan Press), which shows that null hypothesis tests of “significance” are, in the absence of a substantive loss function, meaningless (in 2011 the book figured in a unanimous Supreme Court decision). Her latest book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press) in January 2016, argues for an “ideational” explanation for the Great Enrichment 1800 to the present.

David Webb is the chief investment officer and managing partner of Emerging Markets Development Partners, a frontier and emerging markets impact investment fund based in London, United Kingdom. EMDP’s focus is on consumer facing brands for emerging middle classes and credit for small and medium sized businesses.

Prior to EMDP, David was a senior investment professional at Sub-Saharan Africa focused fund manager TLG Capital. He was a founder and principal of New York and Toronto based investment banking boutique TSU Capital and CEO of South African based electronic payment platform eTaxi. David started his career at Goldman Sachs in New York in the Fixed Income, Currency & Commodities Division. While at Goldman, he worked as part of the investment banking team to advise National City Corporation on the sale of their mortgage origination subsidiary First Franklin and mortgage servicing company Home Loan Services to Merrill Lynch in December 2006, considered a landmark transaction in the subprime mortgage crisis and later global banking crisis.

David received an A.B. in Economics and Government with specialization in International Relations from Dartmouth College. He is a board member of performance and installation art company Opera Erratica and a member of the Canada Club in London.

Christina is managing editor of Capitalism and Society.

She is also managing editor of InvestmentNews, a daily online and weekly print newspaper. Prior to this role, she was managing editor of the Journal of Financial Planning. Her background is in finance, economics and public policy, including a post as legislative analyst for the Embassy of the Republic of Korea.

Amartya Sen is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until 2004 the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Earlier on he was Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University Calcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, and the London School of Economics, and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University.

Saifedean Ammous is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University (2011). His dissertation examined policies supporting biofuels in the United States and the European Union as a case study in energy and environmental policy. Ammous’s research interests include energy and environmental economics as well as monetary economics and political economy. His research is motivated by a consideration of knowledge problems in economics and social affairs, the concept of spontaneous and emergent order, as well as the limitations of centralized planning. He is currently conducting research on the economic roots of the recent popular revolutions in the Arab world. Ammous holds an M.Phil (2007) and MA (2006) in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, an MSc in Development Management (2004) from the London School of Economics and a Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering (2003) from the American University of Beirut.