Faculty Members

Director, Gender Equality and the Economy Program and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

E-mail: [email protected]

Note: Rania is currently on leave.

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. 

See all Levy Institute publications by Rania Antonopoulos

Graduate Programs Director, Director of Applied Micromodeling, and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

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. 

See all Levy Institute publications by Thomas Masterson

Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, Bard College and President Emeritus, Levy Institute

Email: [email protected]

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

Papadimitriou is senior scholar and president emeritus at the Levy Institute 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. 

See all Levy Institute publications by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

Professor of Economics, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

William Waller

William Waller is currently Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (where he has taught since 1982). He is also currently the editor of the Journal of Economic Issues. He was William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He was the Helen Cam Visiting Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge 2017-2018. He received the Veblen-Commons Award from the Association for Evolutionary Economics in 2015. He received his B.S (1978) and M.A. (1979) in economics from Western Michigan University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of New Mexico (1984).  He is a trustee of the Association for Evolutionary Economics.  He is also the past president of the Association for Evolutionary Economics and the Association for Institutional Thought.  Additionally, he is a past trustee of the Association for Social Economics, a former member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Issues, and former member of the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics, where he served as acting Secretary-Treasurer. He has co-edited three books Alternatives to Economic Orthodoxy (M.E. Sharpe, 1987), The Stratified State (M. E. Sharpe, 1992) and Cultural Economics and Theory (Routledge, 2010) His articles on institutionalist methodology, feminist economics, public policy, the economics of care, and the work of Thorstein Veblen have been published in the Journal of Economic Issues, History of Political Economy, Review of Social Economy, Forum for Social Economics, Rethinking Marxism, Review of Institutional Thought as well as a number of edited collections. He is active in the Association for Evolutionary Economics, the Association for Institutional Thought, the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, the Association for Social Economics and the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

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.

See all Levy Institute publications by L. Randall Wray

Research Scholar, State of the US and World Economies Program, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

Giuliano T. Yajima

Giuliano Toshiro Yajima is a research scholar working in the State of the US and World Economies program. He is a member of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team and a coauthor of its Strategic Analysis reports. He works on the Institute’s stock-flow consistent macroeconomic models for the US and for Greece.

His academic research focuses on macroeconomic theory and policy, growth and income distribution, structural change and patterns of innovation, international financial instability, and ecological economics. Publications in scientific journals include, among others, Metroeconomica, Review of Political Economy (ROPE), Industrial and Corporate Change (ICC) and Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE). He has also coauthored several working papers for the Levy Institute series.

He holds a PhD in Economics and Finance from La Sapienza University of Rome and a BA and MSc degree from the same university.

See all of Giuliano Yajima’s Levy Institute Publications

Director, Distribution of Income, Wealth, and Well-Being Program and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

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.

See all Levy Institute publications by Ajit Zacharias

Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Email: [email protected]

Juan Matias De Lucchi

Juan Matias De Lucchi is a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. He specializes in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and central banking. Before joining the Levy Institute, he served as Senior Research Economist and Board Advisor at the Central Bank of Argentina. He has also taught economics at John Jay College (CUNY) in New York and at the undergraduate and graduate levels at universities in Argentina. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research.

Levy Economics Institute
Professor of Economics of Bard College

E-mail: 

Izaura Solipa

Izaura Solipa is a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, where her work focuses on the political economy of finance, examining how elites consolidate and exercise influence through formal and informal institutions. Her current research centers on digital finance and asset management, assessing how different market structures shape wealth accumulation, power, and inequality. She is affiliated with the World Elite Database (WED) project, which systematically maps elite networks globally and within the United States.

Solipa’s academic work is informed by prior professional experience as a Banking Supervisor at the Portuguese Central Bank and as an Economic Advisor in the Portuguese Parliament, linking regulatory and policy expertise with her research on financial power. Before joining Levy, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics at Brown University. She has recently published in Socio-Economic Review and the British Journal of Sociology. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a research assistant at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).