Itay Goldstein
Director
Itay Goldstein is Director of the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation. He is the Joel S. Ehrenkranz Family Professor and a Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been on the faculty of the Wharton School since 2004. He serves as the coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Finance and holds a secondary appointment as a Professor of Economics. Professor Goldstein earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 2001 from Tel Aviv University. He is an expert in the areas of corporate finance, financial institutions, and financial markets, focusing on financial fragility and crises and on the feedback effects between firms and financial markets. His research has been published in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. His research has also been featured in the popular press in the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, National Public Radio, and others. Professor Goldstein is the Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies since 2018. Before that, he served there as an editor for five years. He also served as an editor of the Finance Department in Management Science and an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation. Professor Goldstein is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as an academic advisor in various policy institutions, including the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, the Bank of Canada, the Bank for International Settlements, and the Committee for Capital Markets Regulation. He was the co-founder and the first president of the Finance Theory Group and served as a director of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the Financial Intermediation Research Society. He is a frequent speaker in academic and policy forums around the world, and acted as keynote speaker in leading academic conferences. He has taught various undergraduate, M.B.A., Ph.D., and executive education courses in finance and economics. Prior to joining Wharton, Professor Goldstein has served on the faculty of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He had also worked in the research department of the bank of Israel.
His full website is available here.
Christina Parajon Skinner
Co-Director
Christina Parajon Skinner is Co-Director of the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation. She is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics. Professor Skinner is also currently a Stigler Center Fellow at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Professor Skinner has been an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law, where she will return as a Visiting Lecturer from 2025 to 2028 in connection with the Master’s in Law and Finance Program. She earned her law degree from Yale Law School, an A.B. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. She is the founder of the Women in Law and Finance Group.
Professor Skinner is an expert in financial regulation, central banking, fiscal policy, and financial markets. With a background in international law and policy, Professor Skinner’s research has a particularly international and comparative focus. Her articles have been published in leading law journals and she is regularly featured in the financial press, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, and Fox News.
Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served in the legal directorate at the Bank of England.
Max Harris
Senior Fellow
Max Harris is Senior Fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation. Prior to joining Wharton, he worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury on European macroeconomic issues. In addition, he helped design and implement coronavirus relief programs at Treasury. He has also worked as a policy consultant to former Director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling and as a policy adviser on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. His research focuses on international monetary history, and he is the author of the book Monetary War and Peace: London, Washington, Paris, and the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 (Cambridge University Press 2021). He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
His website is available here.
Adi Marcovich Gross
Postdoctorate Fellow
Adi Marcovich Gross is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation, where she conducts in-depth research at the intersection of business, law, and finance, with a focus on corporate bankruptcy. She is also a J.S.D. Candidate at Columbia Law School (degree expected 2025) where she has been recognized as a James Kent Scholar and has held several teaching and research positions. Her work has been published in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal and presented at various national and international forums, including conferences hosted by the American Law and Economics Association and INSOL International (where she won the Best Paper Award for Early Researchers in 2023), as well as the Wharton-Harvard Insolvency and Restructuring Conference. Adi is also a member of the World Bank’s Working Group on Insolvency and Climate Change. Her work draws on her experience as an attorney in top international law firms. In her most recent role, she worked as a corporate associate at Covington & Burling LLP’s New York office.