Conference Organizers

Stephen Haber is the Park L. Loughlin Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and director of the Hoover Program on the Foundations for Economic Prosperity. He is 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.

Paola Sapienza is the J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she co-directs the JP Conte Initiative on Immigration and she is a founding member of the Hoover Program on the Foundations for Economic Prosperity. She is Finance Professor Emerita at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, where she was a faculty member for over 25 years. Her research interests span from corporate governance to financial development, from political economy to the economic effects of culture and the economics of immigration. She maintains research affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Center for Economic Policy Research, and European Corporate Governance Institute.

Her work has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Economic Studies, Science, and PNAS. She has appeared multiple times on the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate list of most influential scientific minds, and her research has been featured in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Economist.

Sapienza holds a BA from Bocconi University in Milan and MA and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

Isabel is a Senior Research Program Manager at the Hoover Institution. She manages the research initiatives of the Hoover Program on the Foundations of Economic Prosperity, spanning topics such as immigration, financial regulation, and the governance of institutions in partnership with senior fellows. She leads a team of research analysts and program staff in supporting research, executing conferences, and producing reports and other content that communicate insights from economics research to the broader public.

Sue is the Program Administrator for the Hoover Program on the Foundations of Economic Prosperity. She assists with coordinating logistics for all conferences related to the program.