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.
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.
Affiliates
Sean Vanatta
Sean Vanatta is a lecturer in United States economic and social history and senior fellow at The Wharton Initiative for Financial Policy and Regulation. Vanatta’s research examines the transformation of U.S. finance and financial policy. His work has appeared in Business History Review, Capitalism: A Journal of Economics and History, Enterprise & Society, and Management and Organizational History. He is completing a history of the bank credit card industry, Plastic Capitalism: Credit Cards and the Making of Modern Consumer Finance, which is forthcoming from Yale University Press. He is also co-author, with Peter Conti-Brown, of The Bankers’ Thumb: A History of Bank Supervision in the United States (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). In addition to this work on consumer financial- and bank supervisory history, Vanatta is also engaged in work on public pensions and monetary theory. He received his PhD from Princeton. His most recent papers are available on SSRN.
His website is available here