Olha Zadorozhna

I am an Assistant Professor at Kozminski University, where I lead the Master in Big Data Science programme, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, Poland. I have a Ph.D. from Bocconi University and an MA from Kyiv School of Economics and University of Huston.

I work in institutional and political economy and applied econometrics, with a focus on Ukraine, Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. My research looks at how institutions distribute rights, resources and risk, and at who ends up gaining or losing from them. My research shows that the answer depends on the structure of political power, informal norms and the credibility of the state. I trace this at three levels, from land and local government, through financial markets, to the costs of Russia’s war against Ukraine, using causal and quasi-experimental methods and machine learning tools.

I lead the Kozminski team in the Horizon Europe project VALPOP and am the principal investigator of DECODE (EUonAIR). I serve as Executive Editor of Eastern European Economics and sit on the editorial board of Organizations and Their Environments.

I am also the founder and host of the Policy Implications podcast and a co-founder of the “New Dawn” initiative, which advocates EU membership for Ukraine.