About

Andrea Prat is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Columbia University. He received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1997 and subsequently taught at Tilburg University and the London School of Economics before joining Columbia in 2012. His research spans organizational economics and political economy. In organizational economics, his work employs theoretical modeling, field experiments, and data analysis to study organizational design, corporate leadership, employee motivation, and optimal disclosure. In political economy, he focuses on defining and measuring how economic interests such as the media industry, large firms, and wealthy individuals influence the democratic process. Professor Prat has published numerous articles in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Economic Studies. He has served as Chairman and Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and chairs the organizing committee of the European Summer Symposium in Economic Theory (ESSET). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Research topics

• Business
• Industrial organization
• Economics
• Political Science
• Market economy
• International trade
• Management
• Marketing
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Data and Code for: Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-30

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  To investigate general patterns in news information in the U.S., we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47% of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3% confidently choose the fake story, and the remaining half are uncertain. Socioeconomic differences are associated with large variations in the probability of selecting the true news story. Partisan congruence between an individual and a news story matters too, but its impact is up to an order of magnitude smaller.

  PublisherDOI

• Mergers and Non-contractible Benefits: The Employees' Perspective

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Mergers and Non-contractible Benefits: The Employees' Perspective

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-03-01

  reportOpen access

  Incomplete contract theory, supported by anecdotal evidence, suggests that when a firm is acquired, workers may be adversely affected in non-contractible aspects of their work experience.This paper empirically investigates this prediction by combining M\&A events from the Refinitiv database and web-scraped Glassdoor review data.We find that: (a) Controlling for pre-trends, mergers lead to lower satisfaction, especially on non-contractible dimensions of the employee experience (about 6% of a standard deviation); (b) The effect is stronger in the target firm than in the acquiring firm; (c) Text analysis of employee comments indicates that the decline in satisfaction is primarily associated with perceived breaches of implicit contracts.Our findings indicate that mergers may reduce workers' job utility through non-monetary channels.

  PublisherDOI

• Competing Powers *

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-01-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To investigate the emergence of a pro-wealthy bias in the US Supreme Court, we develop a protocol to identify and analyze all cases involving economic issues from 1953 to the present.We categorize the parties in these cases as "rich" or "poor" according to their likelihood of being wealthy.A vote is pro-rich if that outcome would directly shift resources to the party that is more likely to be wealthy.Using this dataset, we estimate case-specific intercepts, justice-specific latent ideal points, and party-level time trends using the Bayesian methods pioneered by Martin and Quinn (2002).In the 1950s, justices appointed by the two parties appear similar in their propensity to cast pro-rich votes.Over the sample period, we estimate a steady increase in polarization, culminating in an implied party gap of 47 percentage points by 2022.The magnitude of the gap suggests the usefulness of an economic metric for prediction relative to ideologies such as originalism or textualism.

  PublisherDOI

• Meritocracy Across Countries

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• CEO-Firm Matches and Productivity in 42 Countries

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01

  reportOpen access

  Firms are key to economic development, and CEOs are key to firm productivity.Are firms in countries at varying stages of development led by the right CEOs, and if not, why?We develop a parsimonious measure of CEO time use that allows us to differentiate CEOs into "leaders" and "managers" in a survey of 4,800 manufacturing firms across 42 countries, with income per capita ranging from USD 4,000 to 45,000.We find that poorer countries have fewer leaders and relate this to training opportunities.Even when suitable leaders are available, they often do not lead the firms that would benefit the most, resulting in mismatches that can cause up to a 20% loss in productivity for the mismatched firms.The findings imply that policies that address the causes of mismatch could significantly enhance growth without additional resources.

  PublisherDOI

• Knowledge Evolution at the Onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Mergers and Non-contractible Benefits: The Employees' Perspective

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Oriana Bandiera

  177 shared

• Raffaella Sadun

  Harvard University

  126 shared

• Stephen Hansen

  University College London

  81 shared

• Amil Dasgupta

  European Corporate Governance Institute

  35 shared

• Luigi Guiso

  Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

  15 shared

• François Ortalo‐Magné

  15 shared

• Tommaso Valletti

  14 shared

• Christian Moser

  13 shared