menu

Benjamin Wittenbrink

Welcome!

I am an incoming Economics PhD student at MIT, starting in September 2024. I recently graduated with a MS in Computer Science (concentration in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) from Stanford. In 2022, I graduated with a BA in Economics with Honors and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford. My undergraduate thesis received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for Outstanding Honors Thesis.

I aim to be an applied microeconomist with a focus on public economics, political economy, and industrial organization. I am especially interested in understanding how governmental policies influence individual choices and welfare, firm-level outcomes, market structures, and societal dynamics, and in integrating machine learning models with traditional econometric methods to do so.

Most recently, I worked as a quantitative researcher and data scientist at QuantCo, a data science startup at the intersection of causal inference and machine learning, in San Francisco. During my masters, I worked as a research assistant with Matthew Gentzkow on projects surrounding digital and social media, political advertising, and polarization. I continue to work on one such project as a lead author.

Previously, I have worked at QuantCo's Zürich office (on a gap year and as a summer intern), at the New York Federal Reserve's Financial Intermediation Research team, as a research assistant for Mark Duggan and Gopi Goda at NBER (and previously at SIEPR), on a neuroeconomics project with Apex Lab, and as a research assistant within John List's lab .