Field of research: Political Economy
Artur Bayramyan
Artur Bayramyan is a PhD candidate in economics at UC San Diego. He works in applied microeconomics, focusing on education and political economy.
Sinara Gharibyan
Sinara Gharibyan is a postdoctoral researcher at Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung in Regensburg. Her research interests lie in political economy, economic history, gender economics, and applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on social capital, collective memory, political behavior, and gender differences in economic outcomes. Her research combines historical and administrative data with modern causal inference methods to study how historical experiences, conflict, and social institutions shape individual and collective behavior.
Violaine D’Ortona
Violaine is a master’s student in the Advanced Economics program at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon, where she also completed her bachelor’s degree. She is currently working as a research assistant at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
Violaine primary research interests lie in political economics, with a particular focus on its intersection with media.
Dariia Mykhailyshyna
Dariia Mykhailyshyna is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics at Kyiv School of Economics. Her research focuses on political economy and applied microeconomics. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Bologna in 2025.
Olle Folke
Olle Folke is a Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, and currently a full-time researcher at SITE. His research focuses on political economics and gender & politics, with a particular emphasis on gender equality in the labor market and political representation. His work has been published in leading journals across economics, political science, sociology and business administration, and he has previously taught at Columbia University and Yale University.
(Last updated March 2026)
Anastasiia Arbuzova
Anastasiia Arbuzova is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE). She holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University and an undergraduate degree from the New Economic School (NES).
Her research focuses on political economy, particularly non-democratic regimes, as well as development economics and gender.
(Last updated February 2026)
Cecilia Smitt Meyer
Cecilia Smitt Meyer holds a M.Sc. in Economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), a B.Sc. in Economics and a B.Sc. in Political Science from the University of Gothenburg.
Cecilia worked as a full-time Research Assistant for the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) between 2022 and 2025. As of August 2025 she works as an analyst at the government offices. Cecilia’s research interests are mainly in gender, political and development economics.
(Last updated August 2025)
Andrei Kolesnikov
Andrei Kolesnikov is a Senior Fellow and the Chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Kolesnikov also works with the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy and is a frequent contributor for Gazeta.ru, and Forbes.ru. He sits on the board of the Yegor Gaidar Foundation and is a member of the Committee of Civil Initiatives (the Alexei Kudrin Committee).
His research focuses on the major trends shaping Russian domestic politics, with a particular focus on ideological shifts inside Russian society. Kolesnikov has taught courses on journalism and modern media at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Russian Golden Quill (Zolotoye Pero Rossii) Award, the Adam Smith Prize, and the Federal Press Agency Award.
Kolesnikov is the author of several books, including a biography of Anatoly Chubais and an analysis of how speechwriters have impacted history.
(Last updated February 2022)
Solomiya Shpak
Solomiya Shpak is a Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics and a Researcher at the National Bank of Ukraine. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University, Schar School of Policy and Government. His fields of interest are Applied Microeconomics, Firm dynamics, and Political Economy.
Maiting Zhuang
Maiting is a Researcher at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) – Stockholm School of Economics. She completed her PhD in Economics at the Paris School of Economics in 2020. She has previously worked as an Economist at the Bank of England. Maiting’s primary research interests are in political economy and development economics.
(Last updated in April 2023.)