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.
Kathleen Weiss Hanley
Senior Fellow
Kathleen Weiss Hanley is a professor and the Bolton-Perella Endowed Chair in finance at Lehigh University College of Business. She is also the director of the Center for Financial Services and the co-director of the Fintech Minor. From 2011 to 2013, she was the deputy chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the deputy director in the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis where she oversaw the integration of economic analysis into policy and rule-making across a broad range of topics in financial economics including the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. In addition, she managed the division’s research activities, data analytics and risk assessment initiatives.
Prior to that time, she was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the risk analysis section and a senior financial economist at the SEC. She has been on the faculty at the University of Maryland as an associate professor with tenure and at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor.
Professor Hanley serves as the executive treasurer and secretary of the American Finance Association and the executive director of the Financial Economists Roundtable. She is also an editor of the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy and was formerly the managing editor of the Quarterly Journal of Finance. She is a program fellow in the Program of Law and Economics of Capital Markets, a joint initiative between Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on capital formation, regulation and market pricing. It has been published in leading finance journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and the Journal of Accounting Research.
Her website is available here.
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.
Loretta Mester
Senior Fellow
Loretta J. Mester was President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from June 1, 2014 to June 30, 2024. Prior to joining the Cleveland Fed, she had served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, starting in 1985 as an economist, becoming senior vice president and director of research in 2000, and executive vice president and director of research in 2010. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and economics from Barnard College of Columbia University and MA and PhD degrees in economics from Princeton University, where she was a national science fellow.
Learn more about Loretta J. Mester here.
Jianzhang Lin
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Jianzhang Lin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation. His research focuses on corporate finance and law and finance, with a particular interest in how legal institutions shape local economic activity and the mechanisms through which firm-level financial distress impacts workers. He also investigates the role of state-level legal provisions in governing the conversion of nonprofit hospitals to for-profit entities and how these regulatory frameworks affect hospital operations and resource allocation. Jianzhang earned his PhD in Finance from Emory University in 2025.
His full website is available here.