Levy Graduate Program Faculty

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Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

Dimitri Papadimitriou is the president of the Levy Economics Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and executive vice president emeritus at Bard College. He has testified on a number of occasions in hearings of Senate and House of Representatives Committees of the U.S. Congress, was vice-chairman of the Trade Deficit Review Commission of the U.S. Congress and was a member of the Competitiveness Policy Council's Subcouncil on Capital Allocation. He served as Minister of Economy and Development for the Hellenic Republic from 2016 to 2018. He was a distinguished scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (PRC) in fall 2002. Papadimitriou has edited and contributed to 13 books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Edward Elgar, and McGraw-Hill, and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Analysis, Challenge, and the Bulletin of Political Economy. Papadimitriou is a graduate of Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. 

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Rania Antonopoulos

Currently on leave serving as Alternate Minister of Labour, Government of Greece, Antonopoulos is a senior scholar and director of the Gender Equality and the Economy Program. Her areas of expertise are gender and macroeconomic policy, pro-poor development, and social protection. She taught economics at New York University and served as a consultant and adviser for the United Nations Entity on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Labour Organization (ILO), among others. During her tenure at the Levy Institute, she directed policy-oriented research projects on South Africa, India, and Mexico, identifying the macro-micro impacts of employment guarantee programs that particularly benefit women. Since 2011, she has collaborated with the Labour Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (INE/GSEE) on a public service job creation program that was adopted by the Ministry of Labour and put into effect in 2012. Building on that experience, she proposed a fully developed job guarantee proposal for Greece, leading a team of researchers that has received significant policy attention. In 2011, she also codirected a joint project of the Levy Institute, UNDP, and ILO that fully integrates women’s unpaid work in official poverty measures, with case studies for Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Antonopoulos holds a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. 

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Thomas Masterson

Thomas Masterson is director of applied micromodeling and a research scholar in the Levy Economics Institute’s Distribution of Income and Wealth program. He has worked extensively on the Levy Institute Measure of Well-being (LIMEW), an alternative, household-based measure that reflects the resources the household can command for facilitating current consumption or acquiring physical or financial assets. With other Levy scholars, Masterson was also involved in developing the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP), and has contributed to estimating the LIMTIP for countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He has also taken a lead role in developing the Levy Institute Microsimulation Model, which he is currently extending in order to assess the inequality impacts of carbon regulation.

Masterson’s specific research interests include the distribution of land, income, and wealth. He has published articles in the Eastern Economic Journal, The Review of Income and Wealth, and World Development, and is the co-editor of Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet—Papers and Reports from the 2009 U.S. Forum on the Solidarity Economy, 2010. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

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Michalis Nikiforos

Michalis Nikiforos served as a research assistant at the New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and in the Policy Integration Department of the International Labour Organization. His research interests include macroeconomics, institutions and economic development, political economy, the theory of production, economics of monetary union, and development economics. His dissertation, “Essays on Distribution of Income, Capacity Utilization, and Economic Growth” (2012), emphasized the implications of possible nonlinearities in the behavior of distribution along the business cycle, and why the concept of a wage- and profit-led economy needs to be redefined. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from The New School for Social Research.

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Fernando Rios-Avila

Fernando Rios-Avila is a research scholar working on the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being under the Distribution of Income and Wealth program. His research interests include labor economics, applied microeconomics, development economics, and poverty and inequality. 

As a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, Rios-Avila worked as a graduate research assistant to Felix Rioja, and interned in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, working under the supervision of Julie L. Hotchkiss. He formerly served as a researcher at the Social and Economic Policy Unit (UDAPE)—a government advisory unit and public policy think tank in La Paz, Bolivia—on issues of development, impact evaluation, and social expenditure, with an emphasis on childrens’ welfare. His research has been published in The Review of Income and Wealth, Industrial Relations, Southern Economic Journal, Applied Economics Letters, Stata Journal, and Business and Economics Research. 

Rios-Avila holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

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James I. Sturgeon

Senior Scholar James I. Sturgeon is professor of economics, emeritus, Missouri–Kansas City. His current research centers on institutional economic theory and Thorstein Veblen’s contributions to distribution and production theory as an alternative to marginal productivity theory. He is currently writing a textbook on institutional economics.

His previous research in institutional economics includes Alternative Streams in Economic Analysis with W. Robert Brazelton and Ivan Weinel (Kendall‑Hunt, 1991), and contributions to Institutional Analysis and Praxis (Springer, 2009) and Policy Implications of Recent Advances in Evolutionary and Institutional Economics (Routledge, 2018). His work in industrial organization includes Which Way Forward? Alternative Paths for Generating Electricity in America’s Heartland (with Stephanie Kelton and Brandon Richman), PURPA Discussion Series: Load Management, Master Metering, Billing, and Information to Customers (US Department of Energy), A Consumer’s Guide to the Economics of Electric Utility Rate Making (State of Illinois and US Department of Energy), The Adverse Economic Impact from Repeal of the Prevailing Wage Law in Missouri (Council for Promoting American Business). He has published in journals including the Journal of Economic Issues, International Journal of Socio-Economics, and the Review of Institutional Thought.

Sturgeon taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City from 1977–2020; he is an honorary fellow at Bremen University, Germany and was staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during 1975–77. He has been a visiting lecturer at University of Rome (La Sapienza) and Poznan University, Poland, among others. He holds a BA from Kansas State Teachers College, MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, where he was a student of Nelson Peach.

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Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Research Scholar Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an associate professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. She specializes in modern money and public policy. She previously taught at Franklin and Marshall College and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. During 2000–6, she served as the associate director for economic analysis at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. In the summer of 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, UK, and since July 2007 she has been a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute.
 
Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020) is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today, recognized by the Financial Times in 2020 and translated in eight languages. She has collaborated with policymakers from the United States and abroad on designing and evaluating employment programs. Her early work assessed Argentina’s adoption of a large-scale job creation proposal she had developed with colleagues in the United States. She also worked with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign after her research on inequality garnered national attention.
 
Her areas of research include monetary and fiscal policy coordination, the Bernanke doctrine, and policy responses during the 2008 and 2020 COVID-induced economic crises. Her research has appeared in the Eastern Economic Journal, Review of Social Economy, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Journal of Economic Issues, International Journal of Political Economy, Revista de Economía Crítica, Revue Européenne du droit, and other journals and book volumes.
 
She is the coeditor of Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey (Edward Elgar 2004), a rare collection of writings on employment and inflation by the Nobel Prize–winning economist, adapted for the modern day. In 2012, Tcherneva received the Association for Social Economics’ Helen Potter Prize for the best paper in the Review of Social Economy.

Tcherneva is a two-time grantee from the Institute for New Economic Thinking for her work on rethinking fiscal policy, job creation, and public goods provisioning. She holds a BA in mathematics and economics from Gettysburg College and an MA and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

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L. Randall Wray

L. Randall Wray is a professor of economics at Bard College and a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. A student of Hyman P. Minsky while at Washington University in St. Louis, Wray has focused on monetary theory and policy, macroeconomics, financial instability, and employment policy. He is the coeditor (with Jan Kregel) of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and publishes extensively in the areas of full employment policy and the monetary theory of production. He is a past president of the Association for Institutionalist Thought (AFIT) and served on the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). He is the author of Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the work of a maverick economist (2015); Modern Money Theory: A primer on macroeconomics for sovereign monetary systems (2012); Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (1998) and Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies: the endogenous money approach (1990). He also regularly writes blogs for the Huffington Post, New Economic Perspectives (UMKC) and The Multiplier Effect (Levy). His blog posts are regularly featured on top financial, news, and economics blog sites around the world. 

Wray holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Rome-La Sapienza, the University of Bologna, the University of Paris-South, the University of Bergamo, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He was the Bernardin-Haskell Professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in the Fall 1996.

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Ajit Zacharias

Ajit Zacharias is a senior scholar and director of the Distribution of Income and Wealth program. His research primarily focuses on the theory, measurement, and analysis of economic well-being and deprivation.

Along with other Levy scholars, Zacharias has developed alternative measures of economic welfare and deprivation. The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) offers a framework that accounts for how changes in labor markets, wealth accumulation, government spending and taxes, and household production shape the economic determinants of standard of living. Levy scholars have utilized the LIMEW to track trends in economic inequality and well-being in the United States. Prof. Zacharias received his Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research.

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Gennaro Zezza

Gennaro Zezza is a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. His research interests include international monetary economics and stock-flow consistent agent-based modeling.

He is associate professor of economics at the University of Cassino, Italy, and member of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team and co-author of the Institute’s Strategic Analysis reports. He worked with the late Wynne Godley in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Italy, as well as at the Levy Institute, specializing in applied heterodox macroeconometric models. He has served as a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research. Zezza holds a degree in economics from the University of Napoli, Federico II.

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