Hoover Prosperity Program

Stephen Haber

Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow

Stephen Haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy).

Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals. He is the author of five books and the editor of six more. Haber’s most recent books include Fragile by Design with Charles Calomiris (Princeton University Press), which examines how governments and industry incumbents often craft banking regulatory policies in ways that stifle competition and increase systemic risk. The Battle Over Patents (Oxford University Press), a volume edited with Naomi Lamoreaux, documents the development of US-style patent systems and the political fights that have shaped them.

His latest project focuses on a long-standing puzzle in the social sciences: why are prosperous democracies not randomly distributed across the planet, but rather, are geographically clustered? Haber and his coauthors answer this question by using geospatial tools to simulate the ecological conditions that shaped pre-industrial food production and trade. They then employ machine learning methods to elucidate the relationship between ecological conditions and the levels of economic development that emerged across the globe over the past three centuries.

Haber holds a Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has been on the Stanford faculty since 1987. From 1995 to 1998, he served as associate dean for the social sciences and director of Graduate Studies of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He is among Stanford’s most distinguished teachers, having been awarded every teaching prize Stanford has to offer.

Peter Blair Henry

Class of 1984 Senior Fellow

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Henry is the former Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (2001–6), where his research was funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

A vice chair of the boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Henry also serves on the boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.

With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Henry leads the PhD Excellence Initiative (PhDEI), a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to addressing underrepresentation within economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhDEI, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association.

Henry received his PhD in economics from MIT and bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campuswide slam dunk competition.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Henry became a US citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.

Daniel P. Kessler

Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow

Daniel Kessler is the Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on economics, public policy, and the health care industry. He is also a professor at the Stanford Law School.

Among his publications are, with Mark McClellan, “The Effect of Hospital Ownership on Medical Productivity,” in the RAND Journal of Economics (2002), and “Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare,” which appeared in Frontiers in Health Policy Research. His books include a forthcoming second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (Hoover Institution Press, 2011), coauthored with Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow John Cogan and R. Glenn Hubbard, and Regulation versus Litigation: Perspectives from Economics and Law (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

He is the holder of a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Ross Levine

Booth Derbas Family/Edward Lazear Senior Fellow

Ross Levine is the Booth Derbas Family/Edward Lazear Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previously a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Levine now co-directs Hoover’s Working Group on Financial Regulation.

Levine’s research sheds light on how financial regulations and the operation of financial systems shape economic prosperity, including economic growth and stability, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, the economic opportunities available to individuals, poverty, income distribution, and the environment. In addition to authoring or editing six books, he has published almost 200 articles in premier economics, finance, and management journals.

Two of his books, Rethinking Bank Regulation: Till Angels Govern and Guardians of Finance: Making Regulators Work for Us, and scores of his articles underscore the complexities of regulatory policies. He shows that regulatory policies often impede competition, harm the efficient allocation of capital, and encourage excessive risk-taking, adversely affecting living standards.

Levine’s research resonates beyond academia, shaping dialogue and policies at prominent international institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank. He serves as an advisor to central banks and regulatory authorities across the globe, and his work has been featured in major media, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Economist.

Having earned a BA from Cornell University and a PhD in economics from UCLA, Levine worked at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the World Bank, where he conducted and managed research and operational programs. In addition to his research and policy contributions, Levine has won several teaching awards at Berkeley and Brown University.

Josiah Ober

Senior Fellow (courtesy)

Josiah Ober, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is also the Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis in the School of Humanities and Sciences, professor of political science and classics, and professor of philosophy (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is the founder and currently the faculty director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, a joint project of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions.

Ober’s scholarship focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory, especially democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. He is the author of several books, including The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (with Brook Manville, 2023), The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022), Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has also published about 100 articles and chapters, including recent articles in American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, Polis, Public Choice, Critical Review, and Transactions of the American Philological Association. Work in progress focuses on the relevance of Aristotelian ethics for the development and regulation of artificial intelligence.

The Stanford Civics Initiative unites participants in the belief that US universities have a responsibility to offer students an education that will promote their flourishing as human beings, their judgment as moral agents, and their participation in society as democratic citizens.

Ober joined the Stanford faculty in 2006, after previously teaching at Princeton and Montana State Universities. He has served as chairman of Princeton’s Classics Department and of Stanford’s Political Science Department. Ober holds a BA in history from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan.

Paola Sapienza

J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow

Paola Sapienza is the J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute.

Sapienza’s main research focuses on the impact of cultural norms on economic decisions and outcomes. She applies these concepts to financial development, political economy, and education. Her work in financial economics sheds light on the interactions among trust, social capital, and civic capital and how cultural attitudes impact financial and economic development. Her work in education investigates how vertical and horizontal cultural transmission of preferences may affect educational outcomes. Sapienza’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Economist.

Amit Seru

Senior Fellow

Amit Seru is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (Stanford GSB), a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was formerly a faculty member at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is currently co-directing Hoover initiatives on corporate governance, long-run prosperity, and regulation and the rule of law.

Professor Seru’s research focuses on corporate finance with an emphasis on financial intermediation and regulation, technological innovation and incentive provision and financing in firms. His research in these areas has been published in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and other peer-reviewed journals. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Finance and was previously an editor of Review of Corporate Finance Studies, department editor (Finance) of Management Science and an associate editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

He has presented his research to U.S. and international regulatory agencies, including the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), European Central Bank (ECB), Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Most recently, he gave the Biennial Andrew Crockett lecture on regulation of banks in the era of fintechs to central bank governors around the world at the BIS. He has received various National Science Foundation grants, the Alexandre Lamfalussy research fellowship from BIS and was named as one of the top 25 Economists under 45 by the International Monetary Fund in 2014. His research has been featured in major media, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times and the Economist. His opinion essays have appeared in several outlets including the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Seru earned a B.E. in electronics and communication and an MBA from the University of Delhi. Subsequently, he received a PhD in finance from the University of Michigan. He was a senior consultant at Accenture before pursuing his Ph.D. Seru was the recipient of a Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at University of Michigan and received a Lt. Governor’s gold medal for overall academic excellence at the University of Delhi.