Benjamin Golub Bio

Benjamin Golub’s research in economic theory focuses on social and economic networks and related topics. A research website, with up-to-date publications and other information, is at http://www.bengolub.net.

Since 2015, Ben has been on the faculty at the Harvard Department of Economics, where he is now Associate Professor; prior to that he spent two years as a Junior Fellow (2013-15) at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has received the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, an NSF CAREER grant (2019) and the Aliprantis Prize (2012) with Matt Elliott for an outstanding paper by a young economic theorist.  He was educated at Stanford (Ph.D. in economics) and Caltech (B.S., mathematics).

Ben's work has examined:

  • Learning and gossip: what are the dynamics of information in networks? Who is particularly influential? When do agents learn correctly? When are their beliefs polarized?
  • Financial contagion: which financial networks are particularly sensitive to sudden breakdowns?
  • The robustness of supply networks: how networks of productive relationships can collapse suddenly in response to small shocks.
  • Public goods and externalities: how networks shed light on complex favor-trading problems and negotiations.

A more detailed overview of his research is available here.