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Research Associates

Robert Ainsworth

Primary Research Areas: Public Economics, Political Economy, Economics of Education

Robert Ainsworth received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2020 and joined the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the same year. His research examines pressing issues in public economics, political economy, and the economics of education. His current research examines how students make schooling decisions, the conditions under which school competition enhances performance, the measurement and effects of gerrymandering, and the effects of local taxes on neighborhood quality and residential location decisions. Professor Ainsworth teaches courses in public economics and econometrics.

Germán Bet

Primary Research Area: Industrial Organization

Germán Bet received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University in 2017. He joined Florida's faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2017. Professor Bet's research focuses on issues related to industrial productivity and competition in the airline industry.
 

Roger Blair

Primary Research Area: Antitrust

Roger Blair received his Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University in 1968. He is now the Huber Hurst Professor of Business and Legal Studies. Professor Blair joined Florida's faculty in 1970 following two years of military service. He has been a Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Washington University, and a Visiting Professor at the University of California - Berkeley and at the University of Hawaii. Professor Blair's research focuses on antitrust economics. He has more than 170 professional publications, including books entitled Law and Economics of Vertical Integration and Control, Antitrust Economics; Monopsony: Antitrust Law and Economics; The Economics of Franchising; and Intellectual Property: Legal and Economic Dimensions of Rights and Rewards. Professor Blair currently serves as the Economics Editor of The Antitrust Bulletin.
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Elias Dinopoulos

Primary Research Area: International Trade

Elias Dinopoulos received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 1985. Before joining the Florida faculty in 1988, Professor Dinopoulos served on the faculties of Michigan State University and Brown University. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Monetary fund, and the Greek government. His recent research examines the causes and effects of trade policies, and the effects of new products and processes on national and global growth. Professor Dinopoulos has published widely in the international economics literature, and is one of two recipients of the 1994 bi-annual Schumpeter prize. Professor Dinopoulos also serves as a co-editor in the Review of Development Economics and in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
 

Javier Donna

Primary Research Areas: Industrial Organization, Environmental Economics, Transportation Economics, Auctions

Javier Donna, a native of Mendoza, Argentina, completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Northwestern University in 2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. His research investigates the efficiency of various market and non-market institutions, including auctions, posted prices, quotas, and online trading platforms. He has examined the operation of many markets, including water markets, transportation markets, and labor markets. Professor Donna was awarded the Public Utility Research Prize for Best Paper in Regulatory Economics at the 2016 International Industrial Organization Conference. His research has been published in leading academic journals and has been featured in many periodicals and news outlets, including The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, VOX EU, Fortune, and Yahoo! Finance.

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Min Fang

Primary Research Areas: Macroeconomics, Macro-Finance, Monetary Economics, Urban Economics

Min Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Rochester in 2021. He joined the Economics Department at the University of Florida in 2023. Previously, he served as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and the University of Lausanne. Much of his research examines the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy and household- and firm-level frictions, including financial frictions and spatial frictions. His research also examines the design of policies to promote industry innovation.
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Vivek Ghosal

Primary Research Areas: Antitrust, Regulation, Healthcare, Industrial Organization

Vivek Ghosal is Professor and Department Head of Economics, and Virginia and Lloyd W. Rittenhouse ’35 Professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His main areas of research and policy work include antitrust, regulation, innovation, law and economics, and health economics. Dr. Ghosal has delivered invited lectures on these topics and others in Germany, France, South Korea, Netherlands, Japan, India, Taiwan, Mexico, Peru, and Chile, among other countries. He has served as an Economist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and as an Economics Expert for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Dr. Ghosal presently serves on the editorial boards of the Review of Industrial Organization, Business Strategy and the Environment, and the Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade.

Gunnar Heins

Primary Research Areas: Industrial Organization, International Trade and Development

Gunnar Heins received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2016 and joined the Economics Department of the University of Florida in the same year. His research focuses on international economics, trade policy, and industrial organization. Dr. Heins' current work studies the impact of globalization on inequality and the cost of living, how import competition affected recent U.S. elections, and the evolution of new markets. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on international economics, data analysis, and empirical analysis.
 

Thomas Knight

Primary Research Area: Antitrust

Thomas Knight is Department Chair and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics. He served previously as Associate Department Chair and Undergraduate Coordinator. Dr. Knight has also held visiting positions at the Federal Trade Commission, New College of Florida, and Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia). He is an applied game theorist who specializes in antitrust inquiry. His current research focuses on the antitrust and social welfare implications of commodity bundling and the interactions between public and private enforcement of antitrust violations. Dr. Knight received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Florida in 2014. 

Scott Kostyshak

Primary Research Areas: Development, Econometrics

Scott Kostyshak received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2015, and joined the Department of Economics at the University of Florida that same year. His research focuses on improving the methods that applied economists employ to investigate a wide range of public policy issues, including how and why life satisfaction varies with age.

Ignacia Mercadal

Primary Research Areas: Industrial Organization, Regulation Policy

Ignacia Mercadal joined the University of Florida in 2021 as an Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2016. Professor Mercadal's research studies questions regarding competition and regulation in energy markets, with a focus on electricity markets. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on data analysis and econometrics.
 

Cecilia Peluffo

Primary Research Areas: International Trade and Development, Labor Economics

Cecilia Peluffo received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2017, and joined the Florida faculty as an Assistant Professor of Economics that same year. Professor Peluffo's research focuses on issues in labor economics and economic development, including migration, social safety nets, intra-household resource allocation, and economic growth.
 

Michelle Phillips

Primary Research Areas: Education Policy, Regulation

Michelle Phillips received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2012 and is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics. She has previously worked as an Economist at the Public Utility Research Center and served as a consultant to the World Bank. Her research focuses on public policy issues in the infrastructure and education sectors. Dr. Phillips' research includes studies of benchmarking in the water sector, energy efficiency in the electricity sector, state government policies regarding textbook adoption in schools, and voting behavior in teachers' unions. Dr. Phillips has helped to develop the Body of Knowledge on Infrastructure Regulation, focusing on the provision of infrastructure services in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
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Eugenio Rojas

Primary Research Areas: International Macroeconomics, Financial Crises, Macroprudential Regulation

Eugenio Rojas received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. He joined the Economics Department of the University of Florida that same year. His research investigates a variety of issues in international macroeconomics, including financial crises and macroprudential regulation. His current work focuses on understanding the causes and effects of financial crises, and on the associated design of macroprudential regulation. Specifically, he studies how imperfections in financial markets interact with the decisions of households, firms, and governments, how these interactions shape the frequency and severity of financial crises, and the financial regulations that can best reduce the prevalence and severity of these crises. Professor Rojas has also studied topics in labor economics and the economics of education.
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Richard Romano

Primary Research Area: Education Policy

Richard Romano received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1982, and joined the Florida faculty that year. He was appointed Gerald L. Gunter Professor of Economics in 1997 and currently holds a University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship. He has also served as a Visiting Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of British Columbia. Professor Romano has published numerous articles on a variety of public policy issues, including government policy toward research and development, and antitrust policy. His current research is focused on education policy, including exploration of voucher and school-choice policies and alternative approaches to school finance. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Hector Sandoval

Primary Research Areas: Education Policy, Labor Economics

Hector H. Sandoval received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. Professor Sandoval joined the University of Florida that year as the Director of Economic Analysis in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR) and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. Before pursuing his Ph.D., Professor Sandoval worked for the Poverty Analysis Division of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) in Mexico. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Office, Mexico. Professor Sandoval conducts applied microeconomic research which focuses on social interactions, peer effects, and social networks.
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David Sappington

Primary Research Areas: Industrial Organization, Regulation

David Sappington received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1980. He presently serves as an Eminent Scholar in the Department of Economics. Before joining the Department in 1990, Professor Sappington served on the technical staff of Bell Communications Research and on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan. He has also served as the Chief Economist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Professor Sappington's research focuses on the design of public policy in regulated industries, including the energy and communications sectors. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Rand Journal of Economics, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy.
 

Perihan Saygin

Primary Research Areas: Education Policy, Labor Economics

Perihan Saygin received her Ph.D. in Economics from IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy in 2012 after conducting extensive research as a visiting scholar in the Center for Labor Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the Department of Economics at the University of Florida in 2016, Perihan worked in the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim, Germany and served as a consultant to the World Bank in Washington D.C. Her empirical, policy-focused research includes investigations of international immigration, gender differences in college applications, and the impact of education and social networks on labor market outcomes, including career choices.
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Daniel Sokol

Primary Research Areas: Antitrust, Industrial Organization

Professor D. Daniel Sokol (USC Gould School of Law and Marshall School of Business) focuses his teaching and scholarship on complex business issues from early-stage start-ups to large, multinational businesses and the issues that businesses face: antitrust, data breaches, corporate governance, compliance, innovation, mergers & acquisitions, collusion, technological transformation, and global business regulation. Professor Sokol taught at the University of Florida prior to joining the faculty at the University of Southern California.