Current Network Fellows
Network Fellows
Amit is a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, working in the Moral Cognition Lab of Professor Joshua Greene. Amit received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2009. Subsequently she worked with Prof. Yaacov Trope at New York University. Amit's research focuses on how people organize information about the world, and what are the implications of this organization to people's perception and action towards the social world. She has shown that people preferentially represent proximal information (either in time, place, or socially) visually, and distal information verbally. Recently, Amit applied insights from this work to the domain of moral psychology, arguing that visual imagery and verbal thinking play distinctive philosophical roles. Amit's work was published in high profile journals such as JEP: General, and Psychological Science. During her fellowship year, Amit will work with Alek Chakroff, investigating the idea that visual representations (either internal, such as visual imagery, or external, such as pictures and movies) encourage a justification of corrupted institutions. In contrast, verbal representations encourage critical thinking and facilitate system change motivations.
Atanasov is a doctoral candidate in Psychology, Judgment and Decision Making at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation examines risk preferences in choices for self and others, using economic games and a large-scale physician survey. After his doctorate, Pavel will serve as a postdoctoral research associate with the Good Judgment Project, combining his interests in decision-making and international affairs. As a Network Fellow, he will work on the development of a new framework for examining negotiations with negative externalities. Bribery and healthcare overutilization are two examples of this class of problems. Pavel has received research funding and awards from the Russell Sage Foundation's Behavioral Economics Small Grants program, the Wharton Risk Center, the Institute of Humane Studies and the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at Columbia University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Economic Psychology, Psychological Assessment as well as health economics outlets such as Value in Health and Pharmacoeconomics.
Azam is a faculty member of the Radzyner School of Law at the IDC. His teaching and research interests include Tax Law, International Taxation, Tax Policy, Cyberspace Law and E-commerce Taxation. He was a Michigan Grotius Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School (2007) and a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School (2004). Prior to joining IDC, he served as internship and senior legal assistant of the Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak.
Azam received his LLD in Law from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2006) where he also received his LLM cum laude (2001) and LLB (1996). His innovative thesis discussed the international taxation of e-commerce in interdisciplinary methodology, which integrated tax law, cyberspace law, international law and political science and made original and significant contribution to the literature. He is the winner of prestigious prizes, including, the Wolf Prize for outstanding doctoral student and the Fulbright Grant. Azam's recent publications include a book entitled International Taxation of E-commerce (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press, 2012) (Hebrew) and the articles Global Taxation of Cross Border E-commerce Income, 31 Va. Tax. Rev. (2012); E-commerce Taxation and Cyberspace Law: The Integrative Adaptation Model, 12 Virginia Journal of Law and Technology 5 (2007). During his fellowship, Azam will research the Israeli Tax Authority and focus on examining institutional corruption, in tax deals and tax reform.
Blanding is a Boston-based magazine writer whose investigative journalism and travel writing have taken him around the world. His work has appeared in publications including The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Consumers Digest, and The Boston Globe Magazine, where he is a contributing editor. Recently, he published his first book of investigative non-fiction, The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink (Avery/Penguin 2010), an expose of the iconic company and its record on health, environmental, and labor issues around the world. His work explores topics including corporate accountability, immigration, sexual abuse, and prison reform.
Bukspan is a senior lecturer at The Radzyner School of Law of The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Israel. He joined the IDC in 1996 after completing his Doctorate in Law at Harvard Law School. Bukspan's research concentrates on the areas of contract and corporate law and their interplay with social and ethical disciplines, as well as other areas of law, including consumer protection, labor, environmental and public law. He is the author of "The Social Transformation of Business Law" - the first and only academic law book written on this subject in Israel to date.
In addition to his academic work, Bukspan has practical experience in the area of ethics in for-profit and not-for-profit entities. He co-drafted codes of ethics for numerous prominent organizations, including large companies, financial intermediaries and a municipality. Bukspan also serves on several committees formed to address and advance the topic of corporate ethics and social responsibility in the Israeli capital markets and is the chair of the Israeli Fund for Class Action Funding. In addition, he participated in drafting a legislative proposal submitted to the Israeli Parliament on the topic of Promoting Ethics in Organizations. As a Network Fellow, Bukspan will research the issue of corporate directors' ethics and its interplay with corporate governance.
Bussell is Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work addresses the political economy of development and reform, with an emphasis on the effects of formal and informal institutional constraints-such as federalism, coalition politics, and corruption-on political behavior and policy outcomes. Her work focuses on large, developing democracies, and she has conducted substantial fieldwork in India. Recent publications include Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age (2012, Cambridge University Press), "Why Get Technical? Corruption and the Politics of Public Service Reform in the Indian States" in Comparative Political Studies, and "Explaining Cross-National Variation in Government Adoption of New Technologies" in International Studies Quarterly. During her year as a Network Fellow, she will be conducting surveys of Indian politicians and bureaucrats to examine corruption patterns across India.
Doty is an author and consultant focused on the practical challenges of keeping organizational commitments. She has written for Yes! Magazine, Strategy + Business, and The Systems Thinker, and has given presentations on organizational integrity at Harvard Business School, The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Systems Thinking in Action, and the Business Ethics Network. Since 1993, Doty's firm WorkLore has helped organizations in over a dozen industries analyze the systemic causes of recurring breakdowns and improve their ability to keep the commitments required to attract employees, customers, investors, and the public trust. In the course of her work, Doty has spoken with over four hundred professionals about their day to day experiences on the job. Her book, The Compromise Trap: How to Thrive at Work without Selling your Soul shares some of these stories and reveals how frequently professionals experience pressure to compromise their values on the job, even in companies they otherwise admire. Doty is currently studying and writing about what is required for a business to keep a promise, including an analysis of the systemic factors that cause commitments to "drift", how leaders can counteract these tendencies, and where external regulatory guardrails are required. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 1991 and her Bachelors in Economics from University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She is on the Board of the Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative and serves as a Steward of the Bay Area Society for Organizational Learning.
Draca is an Assistant Professor (Economics) at Warwick University and a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), London School of Economics. He previously worked as a full-time member of staff at the CEP and studied for his PhD at University College London. His past research has included work on topics including crime, trade, innovation and the minimum wage; with recent papers published in the American Economic Review and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. His focus as a Network Fellow will be further research on lobbying in the US, including more work on the labor market underpinning the revolving door as well as research on the role of staffers in driving Congressional outcomes.
Funcke is a second year PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution located at Stockholm University. He earned a Master's in Pure Mathematics from Stockholm University. He also holds Bachelors' in Theoretical Philosophy and Computer Science from Linköping and Uppsala University respectively. Before pursuing an academic career, Funcke was active as an entrepreneur and CTO in the network security appliance industry, a source of cultural and institutional experiences, as the venture spanned countries as different as Sweden and Venezuela. His primary research interest is the interaction between norms, corruptive behavior and formal institutions. The key assumption, that it is expensive to be corrupt in a non-corrupt context and vice versa, sketches the dynamics. The details are explored using methods from evolutionary game theory, mechanism design and behavioral experiments. Funcke is also the creator and maintainer of the CEKperiment environment, a cloud-based solution for running behavioral experiments, developed with cross-cultural work in mind. During his fellowship, he hopes to extend the norm-centric approach to the study of systemic petty corruption, and look for opportunities to apply current and future insights to institutional corruption, too.
Galperin is an NSF-ASA Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University. He received his PhD in Economic Sociology from MIT Sloan School of Management in 2012. His research focuses on expert work in organizations and explores the relationships between risk, profit, fraud and expertise. To understand these relationships, he studies ways in which individuals and organizations share and delegate risk and responsibility in the context of the U.S. tax preparation industry. For-profit firms in this industry serve as expert intermediaries between individuals and the state and are the de facto executors of fiscal policy. Tax professionals working in these firms rely on local organization of work and technological tools to handle a difficult task of evaluating clients-taxpayers. Thus the implementation of fiscal policy, particularly welfare policies embedded in the tax code, is directly shaped by internal rules and organization of work in a few large firms that dominate the industry. The goal of the study is to understand ways in which the industry handles pressures originating with the market and with the state fiscal agencies in the context of current, post-crisis economic and regulatory environment. The insights from this study are directly relevant to other domains of professional work in which expert agents face persistent conflict of interests.