Ioana Marinescu

Ioana Marinescu is Professor and Faculty Director of the MS in Social Policy (MSSP) Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, with secondary appointments in the Economics Department and the Wharton School of Business (BEPP). She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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 US 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.

Marinescu is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. You can follow her on twitter @mioana and check out her research on her website, marinescu.eu.