The 2025 Stigler Center Affiliate Fellows at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth are a multidisciplinary group of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists.
The Stigler Center at Chicago Booth, of which ProMarket is a part, is happy to announce the fourth cohort of its Affiliate Fellows program.
This non-resident, 3-year appointment is designed to support the research of up-and-coming academics and strengthen and cultivate a community of scholars worldwide working on political economy, regulatory capture, and competitive markets. The second Affiliate Fellows cohort is a multidisciplinary group, composed of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists from multiple different backgrounds and jurisdictions. The fellows will also contribute articles about their research to ProMarket.
Bo Cowgill — Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School
Bo Cowgill is an economist and strategy scholar at Columbia Business School whose research explores the intersections of organizational economics and political economy. His work combines field experiments, theoretical models, and novel data to study how market structures—especially internal labor markets, referrals, and noncompete clauses—affect competition, information flows, and employee mobility. He is broadly interested in the non-market effects of market power, such as the feedback loop between market concentration and firms’ political influence. Professor Cowgill’s research has been published in Management Science, AEJ: Applied, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Organization Science, and Review of Economic Studies, and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. He is a recipient of the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship, the CESifo Prize in the Economics of Digitization, and the Robert Beyster Fellowship, and was named to Poets & Quants’ list of the Best 40 Business School Professors Under 40 in 2020. He is a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and the Zuckerman Institute, a CESifo Distinguished Affiliate, and an IZA Research Fellow. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and previously worked on Google’s economics research team.
Giovanna Invernizzi — Assistant Professor, Bocconi University
Giovanna Invernizzi is an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University. Her research is in political economy, with a focus on political institutions and political parties. She studies how features of the competitive environment — such as electoral institutions — shape party strategies in the electoral arena and in legislatures. Her work covers topics such as intra-party politics, electoral competition, and political accountability. Methodologically, she primarily employs formal theoretical models, complemented by empirical analysis. Prior to joining Bocconi, she was an Assistant Professor at Duke University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Lisa Yao Liu — Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School
Lisa Yao Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Accounting Division at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research explores how regulation and technology shape corporate transparency, with a particular focus on auditing and sustainability. She applies a variety of research methods, including empirical archival analysis, theoretical modeling, structural estimation, field surveys, and interviews. Her work has received multiple awards, has been presented at leading universities and conferences, and has been published in top journals in accounting and law and economics. Prior to joining Columbia in 2020, Professor Liu earned her PhD and MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a master’s degree in Economics from Duke University, and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Renmin University of China.
Max Posch — Assistant Professor, University of Exeter
Max is an economist who studies how social and cultural factors shape creativity, innovation, and economic development. He combines large-scale historical data with modern computational methods, integrating economic theory and insights from cultural evolution to understand how cultural traits evolve and influence social and economic outcomes. Max’s current research leverages novel sources—including a 300-year, 241-million-page U.S. newspaper corpus, patent and census records, and global datasets on historical figures—to examine four core questions: (1) how cultural traits such as individualism, trust and tolerance evolve and interact with economic change; (2) how the medieval Western Church shaped social networks and innovation in Europe; (3) whether cultural similarity accelerates the diffusion of technology and development; and (4) how creativity is shaped across regions and history by religion, institutions, and geography. By bringing new data and empirical strategies to these questions, his work advances our understanding of the interplay between culture and the modern economy.
Diego Ramos-Toro — Associate Professor, Dartmouth College
Diego Ramos-Toro is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and development economics. He studies how political and institutional contexts shape economic and political behavior, with a regional focus on Latin America and the United States. He is particularly interested in how people conceptualize identity, democracy, and state authority under conditions of political repression or exclusion. His ongoing projects develop new approaches to studying how individuals understand democracy and history—and how these understandings shape political behavior. Ramos-Toro received his PhD in Economics and an MA in History from Brown University, and holds a BA in Economics and History from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.
Amit Zac — Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amit Zac is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Centre for Law & Economics, and a former Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on competition law and economic inequality, and an LL.M. in Law & Economics from Erasmus University. His interdisciplinary research explores the intersection of competition law, digital regulation, inequality, and data governance, drawing on law & economics, empirical methods, and computational tools. He has published in leading journals including the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Competition Law and Economics, as well as top computer science conferences such as the USENIX Security Symposium and IJCAI. Amit is a co-founder of the Amsterdam Center for Digital Competition (ACDC) and teaches causal inference to law students and faculty at the University of Amsterdam. He is a recipient of prestigious fellowships, including the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Leverhulme Project Grant at Oxford. His current work investigates the implications of digital platform governance, algorithmic compliance, and sustainable market design, with a focus on the societal and distributional impact of legal frameworks in the digital economy.
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