Jack Fisher
Jack Fisher is an assistant professor of economics at the University o
f Virginia. His research aims to better understand how technology shapes labor markets, like the gig economy, using insights from labor economics and industrial organization. In ongoing projects, he is studying how ridesharing platforms leverage monopsony power, and the inefficiencies that arise from free entry in two-sided marketplaces.
Professor Fisher has studied at the University of York, the University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, and received his PhD from the London School of Economics. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, he spent a summer working at Uber and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Business School.
Professor Fisher will be teaching ECON 3720 Introduction to Econometrics in Spring 2024-25 and he will begin teaching ECON 8150 Economics of Labor Markets in Fall 2025-26.
Chang He
Chang He joins the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of Economics. She is an economist working in the field of international finance and macroeconomics. She studies the determinants of exchange rates and sovereign risks and how they shape the cross-border movements of financial assets. Understanding these issues is crucial for designing effective monetary and fiscal policies in an open economy. Much of her work connects macroeconomic theory with rich micro-level data to empirically verify theoretical mechanisms.
Chang He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2024. While at UCLA, she was a summer intern with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2021 and was a dissertation fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in the summer of 2023. Prior to attending UCLA, she received her M.S. and B.S. in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She will be teaching intermediate macroeconomics this fall and a graduate international finance course in the next academic year.
Po-Hsuan Lin
A behavioral economist, Po-Hsuan Lin uses a combination of theory and experiments to study bounded rationality in strategic environments. His theoretical work contributes to behavioral game theory, currently focusing on developing behavioral solutions such as the dynamic cognitive hierarchy solution and the cursed sequential equilibrium. His experimental research is closely tied to his theoretical work, exploring key methodological questions in experimental game theory.
Lin’s research has been funded by a National Science Foundation doctoral dissertation improvement grant. His “Cognitive Hierarchies for Games in Extensive Form” paper won the California Institute of Technology’s John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science and was recently published in the Journal of Economic Theory.
Lin earned his bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 2016. After that, he joined MobLab Inc. as a data science research intern for a year before attending the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. there in social science in 2024.
This year, Lin will be teaching graduate-level courses in experimental economics.
Alexander MacKay
Alexander MacKay in an associate professor of economics at the University of Virginia. His research addresses how equilibrium prices and markups are influenced by algorithms, long-term contracts, and vertical restraints. He also studies dynamic consumer behavior and its impacts in various contexts, including mergers, the adoption of new technologies, and longer-run sectoral shifts.
His research considers the broader implications for firms and antitrust authorities. His paper, “Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences” was awarded the Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Best Paper in Antitrust Economics. His academic papers have been cited by The New York Times, the Financial Times, TIME Magazine, National Public Radio, and the Economic Report of the President.
MacKay holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in economics from the University of Virginia. Following his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral fellow for one year at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. He joins UVA from the faculty of Harvard Business School, where he was an Associate Professor of Business Administration.
Ahnaf Rafi
Ahnaf Rafi is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia. His field of interest is econometrics and his research interests lie in the design and analysis of experiments and the econometric analysis of consumer demand. In his work on experiments, he characterizes efficient methods to analyse experiments as well as "small sample" issues in the optimal design of experiments. In his work on the analysis of consumer demand, he develops non- and semi-parametric inference methods for consumer welfare in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Rafi also has projects on econometric analysis with high-dimensional data and regression discontinuity design.
Prior to joining the University of Virginia, Rafi obtained his Ph. D. in Economics from Northwestern University in 2024. He also holds a B. Sc. in Mathematics and Economics (obtained 2017) and a M. Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (obtained 2018) from the London School of Economics and Political Science