Faculty Associates

Robert Axelrod	Margaret Kruk	Howard Stein
Deborah Burand	David Lam	Robert Stern
Anusha Chari	James Levinsohn	Jan Svejnar
John Ciociari	Melvyn Levitsky	Katherine Terrell
Alan Deardorff	Ann Lin	Linda Tesar
Kathryn Dominguez	Sharon Maccini	Rebecca Thornton
Scott Greer	Albert Park	Susan Waltz
Juan Carlos Hallak	Shobita Parthasarathy	Marina Whitman
Sioban Harlow	Paolo Pasquariello	Dean Yang
John Jackson	Phil Potter	Kathy Yuan
Vikramaditya Khanna	Jagadeesh Sivadasan	Jing Zhang
E. Han Kim	Rachel Snow	Minyuan Zhao

Robert Axelrod

Robert Axelrod is Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. His areas of specialization include international security, formal models, and complex adaptive systems. Bob's books include Harnessing Complexity (with Michael D. Cohen), Conflict of Interest, The Structure of Decision, The Evolution of Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation. His work focuses on questions of how patterns of social behavior emerge and draws on the current research in a wide range of disciplines, including biology, psychology, and computer science. He is the winner of several national awards and was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and received his Ph.D. from Yale University.

Robert Axelrod's homepage.

Deborah Burand

Deborah Burand is a Professor from Practice and Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School and is the Director of the International Transactions Clinic. Most recently she served as the Executive Vice President, Strategic Services, of Grameen Foundation (a global microfinance network). Burand also is a co-founder and prior President of Women Advancing Microfinance (WAM) International. She also sits on the investment committee of a $75 million microfinance investment fund managed by Deutsche Bank, and on the Advisory Council of MicroVest, a specialized fund investing in microfinance.

Prior to entering the microfinance sector, Burand held several senior internationally-focused positions in the U.S. government. She worked at the Federal Reserve Board from 1989-1994 as a senior attorney in the international banking section of the Federal Reserve Board's legal division, and at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1998-2001, first as the senior attorney/adviser for international monetary matters, and then in a policy position as the senior adviser for international financial matters.

She also worked for nearly seven years as an international corporate attorney at Shearman & Sterling, a law firm in New York. During her time at Shearman Sterling, Burand provided pro bono support to Conservation International as it transacted the world's first debt-for-nature exchange. She also represented bank advisory committees in restructuring the sovereign debt of Brazil, Peru and Vietnam, among others.

In 1993-1994 Burand was an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. During her fellowship she was seconded to the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She now is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also is a member of the bars of New York and the District of Columbia.

Anusha Chari

Anusha Chari is a Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on international finance with an emphasis on the study of emerging financial markets. Her academic and professional pursuits reflect an interest in synthesizing theory and data to find answers to real world problems. Her recent work on stock market liberalization uncovers new stylized facts about the interaction of real and financial markets using firm-level data. These facts complement a growing body of literature that documents the importance of financial development for economic growth. Her current research includes a study of cross border mergers and acquisitions in Latin America and East Asia. Her earlier work examined the effects of central bank interventions using tick-by-tick data in the foreign exchange market. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research's International Finance and Macroeconomics Program.

Anusha Chari's homepage.






Alan Deardorff

Alan V. Deardorff is John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is currently serving as Associate Dean of the Ford School. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University in 1971 and has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1970. He served as Chair of the Department of Economics from 1991 to 1995. He has also served as consultant to many government and international agencies, and is on the editorial boards of several journals. His work on international trade theory has dealt primarily with the theory of comparative advantage and models that explain the patterns and effects of international trade. His work on trade policy has included analyses of anti-dumping laws, safeguards, intellectual property protection, and most recently the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization. With Professor Stern, he is author of the Michigan Model, a computable general equilibrium model of world production, trade, and employment.

Alan Deardorff's homepage.








Kathryn Dominguez

Kathryn M. Dominguez is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include topics in international financial markets and macroeconomics. She has written numerous articles on foreign exchange rate behavior and is author of Exchange Rate Efficiency and the Behavior of International Asset Markets and Does Foreign Exchange Intervention Work? (with Jeff Frankel). Prior to coming to Michigan, Kathryn taught at the Kennedy School of Government and the Woodrow Wilson School. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She has also worked as a research consultant for US AID, the Federal Reserve System, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Kathryn teaches macroeconomics, finance and international economics at the Ford School. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Kathryn Dominguez's homepage.







Scott Greer

Scott L. Greer is Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Professor Greer, a political scientist, does research on the consequences for health policy and the welfare state of federalism, decentralization, and European integration. His work focuses especially on the United Kingdom and the development of health policy in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He has also done research on health politics and federalism in the United States, Canada, and Spain. Before coming to Michigan, he taught at the University of London. He currently directs a two-year project on the consequences for health services and citizenship rights of trends towards both decentralization and the development of European Union powers in health.

Juan Carlos Hallak

Juan Carlos Hallak is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad de San Andres, in Argentina. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan until 2007. He teaches courses in International Trade at the undergraduate and graduate level.

His main research interests are in the fields of international trade and industrial development. He has studied the role of product quality as a determinant of the global patterns of trade, the empirical relationship between accumulation of factors of production, development, and international specialization, and the impact of trade openness on economic growth. His current research focuses on the determinants of export performance at the level of firms and sectors of economic activity, with particular emphasis on the role of quality upgrading.

Juan Carlos Hallak's homepage.

Sioban Harlow

Sioban Harlow is Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Dr. Harlow is the Director of the new University Michigan Global Health Research and Training Initiative (UM-GHRT). Funded in October 2005 by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, the University of Michigan Global Health Research and Training Initiative engages undergraduate and graduate students in multidisciplinary global health research; encourages innovative research collaborations across the University; and supports research and training partnerships with institutions in low-and middle-income countries.

For the past eight years, Dr. Harlow has focused on development of human resources in reproductive health research, a project originally funded through The NIH Fogarty International Center, in collaboration with El Colegio de Sonora and with the University of Zimbabwe. She is Principal Investigator of a collaborative study examining the impact of economic development and socio-environmental vulnerability on infant mortality in Sonora. She is also a member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for the Reproductive Health Research division of the World Health Organization.

She is also Principal Investigator of a multi-study project on staging reproductive aging and co-Principal Investigator for the Michigan site of the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, a multi-site longitudinal study of health of women as they transition through the midlife.

John Jackson

John Jackson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Professor Jackson's major interest is the creation, evolution, and growth of market economies, with a concentration on the dynamics of firm creation, growth, and death. He is modeling these processes to understand how a wide variety of economic, political, and sociological factors affect these dynamics. The work also considers how the growth of the de novo economic sector contributes to the development of both an economic and a political middle class. The research integrates concepts from industrial organization, organizational ecology, dynamic systems, and econometrics. The subject matter ranges from an intensive study of Michigan's economy between 1978 and the present, to studies comparing U.S. states in the 1970's and 1980's, to data collections and analysis in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. A second interest is the development and statistical estimation of models of the dynamics of two-party electoral competition in a situation where voters' preferences are endogenous and where political parties have multi-valued objective functions. Early results indicate that these extensions lead to quite different electoral processes and outcomes. Professor Jackson's methodological interests focus on evolutionary models with path dependent properties and the implication of those models for empirical analysis.

John Jackson 's homepage.






Vikramaditya Khanna

Vikramaditya Khanna is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He earned his S.J.D. at Harvard Law School and has been visiting faculty at Harvard Law School, a senior research fellow at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School, and a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School. He was a recipient of the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship for 2002-2003, and his areas of research and teaching interest include corporate and securities laws, law in India, corporate governance in emerging markets, corporate crime, corporate and managerial liability, and law and economics. He is the founding and current editor of both the India Law Abstracts and the White Collar Crime Abstracts on the Social Science Research Network. He has testified in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on matters related to white collar crime and was appointed Special Master in a dispute between an Indian company and an American company. In addition, Professor Khanna recently discussed his research on India at the Securities & Exchange Board of India - the Indian securities markets regulator. Professor Khanna's papers have been published in a number of academic journals including the Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Boston University Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal. He has given talks at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Wharton, Stanford, Yale, European Financial Management Association Annual Meeting, American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting, Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, NBER, and a number of venues in the US, India, China, Turkey, Canada, Greece and Singapore amongst others.

E. Han Kim

Dr. Kim is the Fred M. Taylor Professor of Business Administration; Director, Mitsui Life Financial Research Center and East Asia Management; Professor of Finance and International Business at the University of Michigan. Dr. Kim's current research activity is concentrated on Professor Kim's current research activity is concentrated on corporate governance, labor issues, firm productivity, emerging markets, mutual funds, and equity financing.

Margaret Kruk

Dr. Margaret Kruk is an Assistant Professor in Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She also consults to the Averting Maternal Death and Disability Project at Columbia University and the United Nations. Previously, she was a policy advisor for Health at the Millennium Project, an advisory body to the UN Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. At the Millennium Project Dr. Kruk worked with expert Task Forces on HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria, Access to Essential Medicines, and Maternal and Child Health and assisted Ministries of Health in several developing countries with goal-based health planning. Prior positions include working as Engagement Manager with the New York office of McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm, and as acting Country Manager with Medecins sans Frontieres in Lebanon. Dr. Kruk holds an M.D. from McMaster University and an M.P.H. (Health Policy and Management) from Harvard University. On completing her family medicine residency, she practiced family and emergency medicine in remote northern Ontario, Canada. Her research focus is in quantitative analysis of patient and provider preferences and health systems performance in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

David Lam

David Lam is Professor in the Department of Economics and Research Professor in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. He received a M.A. in demography in 1982 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1983 from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lam's research focuses on the interaction of economics and demography in developing countries, including analysis of the economics of population growth, fertility, marriage, and aging. He has worked extensively in Brazil and South Africa, where his research analyzes links between education, labor markets, and income inequality. He was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Research in Rio de Janeiro in 1989-90. He was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town in 1997-98 and again in 2004-06. His collaborations with the University of Cape Town include the Cape Area Panel Study, a longitudinal survey of young people in Cape Town supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America and a member of the Committee on Population of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has served as an advisor or consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the United Nations Population Division, and the South Africa Office of the Presidency.

James Levinsohn

James A. Levinsohn is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on econometric analysis in international trade and industrial organizations. He has also developed trade models for the U.S. automobile industry. Jim has published articles on trade policy and on the international impact of competition on firms. Prior to coming to Michigan, he worked for the World Bank and the Botswana Ministry of Finance. At the Ford School, he teaches microeconomics, international economics, and industrial organization. Jim's M.P.A. and Ph.D. are from Princeton University.

James Levinsohn's homepage.








Melvyn Levitsky

Ambassador (Ret.) Melvyn Levitsky is Professor of International Policy and Practice at the Gerald R. Ford School and is Senior Fellow of the International Policy Center. Ambassador Levitsky is also a member of the Substance Abuse Research Center (UMSARC), a Faculty Associate of the Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Center for European Union Studies, and a Faculty Advisor to the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in the fall of 2006, Ambassador Levitsky was Professor of Practice in Public Administration and International Relations at Syracuse University's Maxwell School. In May 2006 Ambassador Levitsky was reelected by a vote of the UN Economic and Social Council to a seat on the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), an independent body of international experts headquartered in Vienna and responsible for monitoring and promoting standards of drug control established by international treaties. During his 35-year career as a U.S. diplomat, Ambassador Levitsky was Ambassador to Brazil from 1994-98 and before that held positions as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, Executive Secretary of the State Department, Ambassador to Bulgaria, Deputy Director of the Voice of America, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. Ambassador Levitsky is the recipient of Department of State Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards and Presidential Meritorious Service Awards. On his retirement he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and a Master of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Iowa.

Ann Lin

Ann Chih Lin is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Reform in the Making: The Implementation of Social Policy in Prison (Princeton University Press 2000) and the co-editor, with Sheldon Danziger, of Coping with Poverty: The Social Contexts of Neighborhood, Work, and Family in the African-American Community (University of Michigan Press 2000). She is currently finishing a book manuscript, Inclusion, Exclusion, and Opportunity: The Political Socialization of Arab Immigrants in Detroit, a project supported by the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Lin is also a co-principal investigator on the Detroit Arab American Study, a landmark public opinion survey of Arab Americans in Detroit. Dr. Lin received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1994 and was the 1992-93 Robert W. Hartley Fellow in Governmental Studies at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Prior to receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Lin was a social worker at Covenant House in New York City, and a member of the Covenant House Faith Community. At Michigan, Dr. Lin teaches courses on public policy implementation, gender and politics, qualitative research methods, and immigration.

Sharon Maccini

Sharon Maccini is Lecturer at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy where she teaches courses in public health and applied microeconomics for MPP students. As a health economist, her overarching research interest is in the econometric evaluation of public health policies in developing countries. Current research focuses on the impact of decentralization on health outcomes and public health, and the role of environmental conditions at birth on health and socioeconomic status in adulthood. She holds a BA in political science from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University.

Sharon Maccini's homepage

 

Albert Park

Dr. Park is a Reader in Economics (jointly with the School of Interdisciplinary Areas Studies) at Oxford University. His recent research has focused on poverty, human capital (health and education), labor markets, and globalization. He is currently co-directing the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF), a longitudinal study of rural youth in western China, and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS)

Shobita Parthasarathy

Shobita Parthasarathy is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program. She does research on the politics of science and technology, both in the United States and abroad. Current areas of interest include: comparative and international politics of genetics and biotechnology; the patentability of human biotechnology such as genes and stem cells; regulation of genetic medicine; the roles of patient advocacy groups; and the relationship between science and democracy. She recently published her first book, entitled Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), which compares the development of genetic testing for breast cancer in the United States and Britain. Her current research focuses on the politics of patenting biotechnology in the US and Europe, exploring, in comparative perspective, how democratic objectives are interpreted by technical institutions. Primary funding for this project comes from a Scholar's Award from the Science, Technology, and Society Program of the National Science Foundation.

At Michigan, Shobita co-directs a university-wide program in science, technology, and public policy, and teaches courses in genetics and biotechnology policy, science and technology policy analysis, and political strategy. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from Cornell University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cambridge. During the 2007-2008 academic year, Shobita Parthasarathy was awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the American Council of Learned Societies. During the Winter 2009 semester, she will be on leave, as a Visiting Scholar at the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes in Washington, D.C.

Paolo Pasquariello

Paolo Pasquariello is Assistant Professor of Finance at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Paolo's research interests are in the areas of information economics, international finance, and market microstructure. His research analyzes the impact of important features of trading on the process of price formation in domestic and international equity, government and corporate bond, currency, and real estate markets. In recent studies, Paolo has examined strategic trading activity in stock and bond markets, financial contagion, the pricing of ADRs during financial crises, and the relation between market microstructure measures of firm-level adverse selection and the cross-section of firms' capital structure. His work has been published by Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Markets, Real Estate Economics, and Journal of Empirical Finance. Paolo has professional experience as a portfolio manager in Italy, as a fixed income analyst for Goldman Sachs, and as a foreign exchange analyst for J.P. Morgan.

Paolo received a B.A. in macroeconomics and monetary economics from Bocconi University, and his M.B.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Finance from the Stern School of Business, New York University.

Paolo Pasquariello's homepage.




Phil Potter

Philip Potter is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science. He studies and teaches in the areas of international security and American foreign policy. His current research projects explore the relationship between interdependence and international conflict; the impact of public opinion and media on foreign policy; and the role of networks in transnational terrorism. Philip holds a B.A. from McGill University, a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a fellow at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Phil Potter's homepage.






Jagadeesh Sivadasan

Jagadeesh Sivadasan is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Professor Sivadasan obtained a PhD in Economics (and an MBA) from the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.

Professor Sivadasan's primary research focus is on the causes and consequences of differences in firm level productivity. He has examined the efficiency consequences of tariff liberalization, FDI deregulation and partial privatization in India, and the efficiency consequences of labor market regulations that reduce flexibility in adjusting employment. He research interests include examining the role of capital and labor markets in re-allocating resources from less to more efficient firms and understanding the determinants and consequences of exporting and patenting activity.

Rachel Snow

Rachel Snow is Associate Professor, Health Behavior & Health Education and
Research Associate Professor, Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Trained as a reproductive biologist, she has a Sc.D. in Population Sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health. She was Assistant Professor of Reproductive Health at Harvard, then Unit Head for Reproductive Health at the University of Heidelberg (Medical School) in Germany for 6 years before coming to Michigan. Rachel has served on numerous expert committees at the World Health Organization dealing with issues such as gender, human rights, sexually transmitted infections, and contraceptive technology development. She has conducted clinical and epidemiologic research on contraception, reproductive morbidity, and gender in a wide range of countries, including China, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and South Africa. She was a founding editor of the African Journal of Reproductive Health, serving as co-editor until 2002, and is co-editor of the forthcoming WHO volume on Gender and Health. She is currently conducting research on the operational and policy challenges of integrating HIV/AIDS into reproductive health programs in Burkina Faso and South Africa, and the social impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Howard Stein

Howard Stein is a Professor in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) and also teaches in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. He is a development economist educated in Canada, the US and the UK who has taught in both Asia and Africa. His research has focused on foreign aid, finance and development, structural adjustment, health and development and industrial policy. His latest recently completed volume is entitled "Beyond the World Bank Agenda: An Institutional Approach to Development" (University of Chicago Press, 2008). The book examines the evolution of the World Bank agenda aimed at explaining the failure of their policies in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. The volume also attempts to generate an alternative approach with applications to state formation, financial develolpment and health care policy based on institutional economic theory. He teaches a variety of courses in CAAS and Epidemiology including the history of African economic development, Africa and post-war development theory and policy and health and socio-economic development. He has been involved in organizing the African Development and Human Security Project which is a CAAS based initiative aimed a building a campus-wide network of graduate students and faculty interested in human security issues on the continent.

Robert M. Stern

Robert M. Stern is Professor of Economics and Public Policy (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. Professor Stern received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1958. He was a Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands in 1958-59, taught at Columbia University for two years, and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1961. He has been an active contributor to international economic research and policy for five decades. He has published numerous papers and books on a wide variety of topics, including international commodity problems, the determinants of comparative advantage, price behavior in international trade, balance-of-payments policies, the computer modeling of international trade and trade policies, trade and labor standards, services liberalization, and U,S.-EU regulatory . He has been a consultant to and done research under the auspices of several U.S. Government agencies, international organizations, and foreign government agencies.

He has collaborated with Alan Deardorff (University of Michigan) since the early 1970s in developing the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade. This is a computer-based model that has been used to study a variety of important policy issues such as the effects of the GATT/WTO multilateral trade negotiations, changes in the structure of protection, trade and employment, changes in military expenditures, and the effects of regional trading arrangements. He is currently working on the computational modeling and analysis of regional trading blocs, issues in U.S.-Japan international economic relations, the political economy of U.S. trade policy, issues in the design of the WTO and the conduct of multilateral trade negotiations, and IMF policies of services liberalization.

Robert Stern's homepage.








Linda Tesar

Linda Tesar is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1990 and spent seven years on the faculty at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She joined the faculty at Michigan in 1997. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visitor in the Research Departments of the International Monetary Fund, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. She has also served on the Academic Advisory Council to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Her research focuses on issues in international finance, with particular interests in the international transmission of business cycles and fiscal policy, the benefits of global risksharing, capital flows to emerging markets, international tax competition and the impact of exchange rate exposure. Results of her research have been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, the Review of Economic Dynamics and the Journal of Monetary Economics.

Linda Tesar's homepage.







Rebecca Thornton

Rebecca Thornton is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan economics department. She received a B.S. at the University of Michigan in Mathematics and German and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government with a joint degree from the Harvard University Economics Department and the J.F. Kennedy School of Government in 2006. Professor Thornton teaches courses in development economics at the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels. She has extensive research experience in experimental research techniques in the areas of health and education in developing countries. Professor Thornton's research has involved a number of field-experiments in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America that cover topics such as HIV prevention, women's reproductive health, primary education, health insurance, and road safety. She has a number of on-going projects including: An experimental study of merit-based scholarships for girls measuring the effects of scholarships on school attendance and test scores in rural Kenya; A randomized experiment on the impacts of information about male circumcision and HIV transmission rates on risky or safe sex practices among men in rural Malawi; A randomized conditional cash transfer project to study the demand for HIV results in Malawi and the subsequent effects of learning HIV results on behavior; A randomized conditional cash transfer project to study how financial incentives to maintain HIV status affect safe and risky sexual practices in Malawi; A field experiment to study how having access to menstruation sanitary products affects school attendance among adolescent girls in rural Nepal as well as the impact of social networks in the decision to adopt the use of these products; A large-scale impact evaluation of the effect of randomized subsidies of health insurance on insurance take-up, retention, and effects of insurance among informal sector workers in Nicaragua. Dr. Thornton is an affiliate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) whose main aims are to use experimental methods to translate research into policy action and alleviate poverty in the developing world. Dr. Thornton has extensive field experience designing and implementing these field experiments.

Susan Waltz

Susan Waltz is Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Pubic Policy, University of Michigan. Professor Waltz is a specialist in human rights and international affairs. She is author of Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics (1995), and in recent years she has published a series of articles on the historical origins of international human rights instruments and the political processes that produced them. This work calls attention to the contribution of small states to the development of human rights law. More recent work includes an analysis of US small arms transfer policy and its human rights implications.
Alongside academic work, Professor Waltz has been active in human rights advocacy and non-profit governance. From 1993-1999 she served on Amnesty International's International Executive Committee and from 2000 to 2008 served on the national board of the American Friends Service Committee. She has convened a working group on military transfers for Amnesty International-USA and she has been involved with international efforts to promote an Arms Trade Treaty regulating the small arms trade. Professor Waltz received her PhD in International Studies from the University of Denver.

Marina Whitman

Marina v.N. Whitman is Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy in the Ross School of Business and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.  From 1979 until 1992 she was an officer of the General Motors Corporation, first as Vice President and Chief Economist and later as Vice President and Group Executive for Public Affairs.  She served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1972-73, while on leave from the University of Pittsburgh.
Professor Whitman received a B.A. in government from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.  She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, honors and awards, and holds honorary degrees from over twenty colleges and universities.  She has served on the boards of several major U.S. corporations, as well as numerous governmental and non-governmental advisory boards, which currently include the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute for International Economics, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Dr. Whitman’s research interests focus on international trade and investment, trade policy and labor-market adjustments, the changing role of U.S. multinational corporations,global corporate social responsibility, and the question of global convergence toward a common model of capitalism. She has published numerous books and monographs, as well as articles in professional journals.  She teaches courses on managing international trade and investment and globalization and public policy.

Dean Yang

Dean Yang is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Economics, University of Michigan. His research deals with economic issues in developing countries. His specific areas of interest include microfinance, international migration and remittances, human capital, disasters, international trade, and crime and corruption. He is currently running survey work and field experiments among El Salvador migrant workers in the U.S., among Philippine migrant workers in Qatar, and on microfinance in Malawi. Professor Yang teaches courses in development economics and microeconomics at the undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. levels. During 2006-07, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He has worked as a consultant on development issues for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the UNDP, and in El Salvador and Peru. He received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University.

Dean Yang's homepage.









Kathy Yuan

Kathy Yuan is Assistant Professor of Finance at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and the London School of Economics. Dr. Yuan's research focuses on asset pricing, information economics, market microstructure, behavioral finance, and international finance.

Jing Zhang

Jing Zhang is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. Professor Zhang's current research focuses on impacts of international financial frictions on international capital flows and risk-sharing and sovereign defaults. Other research interests include long-run behavior of real exchange rates, the world income distribution and financial crisis.

Jing Zhang's homepage.






Minyuan Zhao

Minyuan Zhao is Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. from Stern School of Business, New York University in May 2004. Before joining Michigan, Minyuan was Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she taught Strategy and International Environment classes to MBA and EMBA students. Minyuan's research interests are in the interaction between firm strategies and external environments in a global context. Her dissertation on multinational R&D and intellectual property rights protection received first place in the 2003 INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition and the BPS Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Conference in 2004. Her recent studies examine how internal linkages among firms' geographically dispersed units allow them to alleviate policy uncertainties at the local level. She currently serves on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of International Business Studies as well as the Research Committee of BPS.