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.
George Bridges (Lord Bridges of Headley MBE)
Senior Fellow
George Bridges has spent half his career in business, half in UK politics.
George is currently Senior Adviser to Ana Botin, the Group Executive Chairman of Banco Santander. He advises on a range of issues including regulation, strategic communications and the Group’s approach to environmental, social and governance issues. George has helped to devise and implement a Group-wide strategy to promote inclusive and sustainable growth in the 10 markets where it operates; to strengthen its governance and policies relevant to this agenda; and to set clear metrics to measure progress in a way that delivers for shareholders. Earlier in his career George helped to devise and implement a strategy to make Santander’s culture customer focused – simple, personal and fair – an approach that has now been rolled out across the Santander Group worldwide.
George is also an active member of the House of Lords. A Conservative peer, he is currently chairman of the influential Economic Affairs Committee. During his time on the Committee, he has been involved in inquiries into the sustainability of the UK’s national debt; the impact of quantitative easing; central bank digital currencies; the UK’s energy supply and the green transition; inactivity in the UK labour market; and the operational performance of the Bank of England.
Before returning to work at Santander, George was a Minister in the UK Government. He was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) between July 2016 and June 2017 (when he resigned). He was responsible for helping to prepare the Government’s negotiating position for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union; overseeing plans to ensure the UK’s economy and infrastructure is ready for the UK’s withdrawal; and developing the domestic legislation needed to implement the UK’s withdrawal. In 2017 he took the legislation to trigger Article 50 through the House of Lords.
Before the referendum, George was a Minister in the Cabinet Office, where he helped to implement and co-ordinate Government policy on a wide range of issues such as infrastructure, childcare, apprenticeships and counter-extremism. He took a number of pieces of legislation through the House of Lords, including reforms to the Bank of England and financial regulation, as well as charity law.
Previously he ran Quiller Consultants, a strategic communications company, at which he advised multinational companies, foreign governments and public institutions on all aspects of communications.
Before working at Quiller, George worked in politics and the media. From 1994 to 1997 George worked in 10 Downing Street as Assistant Political Secretary to the Prime Minister; from 2004-5 he was Chairman of the Conservative Research Department, helping to shape and implement the Party’s political strategy; from 2006-7 he was Campaign Director for the Conservative Party, responsible for the Party’s media, political and campaign teams. George spent two years at The Times, writing editorials on politics and domestic issues; and also worked for Britain’s largest commercial terrestrial broadcaster, helping to set up the country’s digital terrestrial television network.
For a number of years George advised the CEO of Tesco, Sir Terry Leahy. George helped Sir Terry write Management in Ten Words, which The Economist described as “a surprising and incisive management page-turner that has interesting things to say about everything from the evolution of British society to the art of transforming huge organisations”, and made it one of its Books of the Year 2012.
George is a Trustee of The Ditchley Foundation, a long-standing institution which aims to strengthen the UK-US relationship. He continues to write for publications such as The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph.
George was educated Exeter College, Oxford (where he was a Stapledon Scholar, and was awarded a First in Modern History); and the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a Thouron Scholar). He is married, and has three children. He was awarded an MBE in 1997, and became a life peer in 2015.
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 M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Princeton University, where she was a national science fellow.
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.