Associate Professor
University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice
Ioana Marinescu, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, with secondary appointments in the Economics Department and the Wharton School of Business (BEPP), and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Dr. Marinescu’s scholarship links labor economics, antitrust and technological change to study how market power and innovation affect wages, employment and inequality. Her pioneering research on wages and monopsony power led to her Congressional testimony on labor market competition and her subsequent appointment as principal economist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division (2022-2024). There, she helped integrate labor market analysis into the 2023 Merger Guidelines, the first version to explicitly address worker impacts.
Her current projects focus on the economic implications of artificial intelligence and on policy tools, such as safety nets and competition policy, that can foster broad-based prosperity in an AI-driven economy. She brings this perspective to Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Council and provides briefings and expert insights on labor markets, antitrust and AI to policymakers, journalists and private-sector leaders.
Dr. Marinescu publishes in top journals including the Review of Economic Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where she serves as an associate editor. Her research regularly appears in outlets like The New York Times and The Economist.