Christian Catalini

Christian Catalini was Head Economist at calibra, blockchain at Facebook.

Christian Catalini is the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor at MIT, and Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management, MIT Sloan School of Management.

Christian's main areas of interest are the economics of digitization, entrepreneurship, and science.

His research focuses on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, the economics of equity crowdfunding and startup growth, and the economics of scientific collaboration.

Christian is one of the principal investigators of the MIT Digital Currencies Research Study, which gave access to all MIT undergraduate students to Bitcoin in the Fall of 2014. He is also part of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a faculty advisor at the Digital Currency Initiative. Since 2018, he is a faculty research fellow in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management), and MSc (summa cum laude) in Economics and Management of New Technologies from Bocconi University, Milan. In 2009-10 he was a visiting student at Harvard University.

His work has been featured in Nature, Science, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, WIRED, NPR, Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, VICE news and the Washington Post among others.

He has presented his research at a variety of institutions including Harvard University, MIT, Yale University, London Business School, New York University, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, the Federal Reserve Bank, the US Treasury, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the World Bank, and the White House OSTP.