Center Selects Four Postdoctoral Research Scholars
The Center for Political Economy has selected four recipients of the Postdoctoral Research Scholars program for 2024-2025.
The Center welcomed the new research scholars: Dario Laudati, William O’Connell, Nils Kupzok, and Michael Gould-Wartofsky.
Each scholar is assigned to one of the Center’s four Idea Labs: Firms and Industrial Policy, Money and Finance, Political Economy of Climate, and Work and Labor.
Learn more about the scholars below.
The Center’s Postdoctoral Research Scholar program is intended to provide early-career scholars with time to undertake research and/or writing for projects that will make substantial and original contributions to the understanding of political economy.
Dario Laudati received his PhD in Economics from the University of Southern California. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Bocconi University (Italy), and a Joint Master's degree in Economics from Bocconi and Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He is primarily interested in the interconnections between macroeconomics and finance, and in international macro. During his Ph.D., he conducted studies on wealth inequality in the U.S., geographic inequality in Italy, and the effect of sanctions on the Iranian economy.
Dario is joining the Money and Finance Lab to work on the links between banking competition, lobbying, and financial deregulation in the U.S., among others. Additional information about Dario’s research can be found on his website.
William O’Connell completed his PhD in political science at the University of Toronto, his MA in international economic policy at Carleton University, and his BA in international political economy at Bishop’s University. His research focuses on international finance, global governance, and the political economy of multinational corporations. His book project examines the historical development of international cooperation in resolving cross-border bank failures, while his postdoctoral research examines the regulation of systemic risk in derivatives, insurance, and asset management.
He has written op-eds and made media appearances discussing cryptocurrency regulation, the failures of FTX, Credit Suisse, and Silicon Valley Bank, and a variety of Canadian economic policy issues. He was born and raised in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Nils Kupzok is a comparative political economist working on green industrial, fiscal, and monetary policies. He is currently building a dataset of green fiscal spending across the OECD to explain the diversity in green industrial policies. So far, Nils’ research has been published in leading political science journals, including a forthcoming piece on the role industry advocacy has played in the rise of policies like the US’ Inflation Reduction Act. Nils has received several awards, including the Emerging Scholar Policy Prize from Perry World House and Foreign Affairs.
Nils received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University's Department of Political Science in 2022 and has been a Postdoc at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. since then. Please visit his homepage for more detailed information or follow him on twitter.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia University and writer whose work explores the nexus of race and class, power and inequality, states and social movements: from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the migrant labor movement to the rise of the far right.
He is the author of "The Occupiers" (Oxford 2015) and the forthcoming "(Anti)Fascism in America" and has written for The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Gizmodo, Jacobin, Jewish Currents, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Newsweek. Born and raised in NYC, he holds a BA in Government from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from NYU.