Ina Ganguli
Professor
Ina Ganguli is a professor in the Departments of Economics and Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research areas are labor economics, the economics and management of science and innovation, entrepreneurship, with a focus on the migration of scientists, gender disparities in labor markets, and scientific collaboration, academic entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a BA from Northwestern University. She serves as Evaluation Lead for the NSF I-Corps Hub: New England Region, and previously directed the UMass Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI). In 2026, she was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in France studying the immigration of scientists, and earlier was a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine. She is a Research Associate at NBER, a Research Fellow at IZA, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Laboratory for Innovation Science.
Education
Research Interests
Teaching Areas
- Econ 336 – Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation
- Econ 341 – Labor Economics
- Econ 452 – Econometrics
- Management 462 – Social Entrepreneurship
- Management 360B – Management of Innovation
- Regression & Advanced Modeling
- Econ 781 – Graduate Labor Economics
Awards
Media, Industry, and Public Impact
Roles:
Senior Fellow, Institute for Progress (IFP)
Evaluation Lead, NSF I-Corps Hub: New England Region
Co-organizer/instructor for IFP Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation Online PhD Short Course: https://ifp.org/economics-of-ideas/
Co-organizer/instructor for NBER Innovation Research Boot Camp: https://www.nber.org/conferences/innovation-research-boot-camp-summer-2026
Interviews/policy contributions/podcasts:
"The Endless Frontier: How Politics and Policy Shape Modern Science," podcast interview (with Dr. Chris Fisher), Whimsical Wavelengths, Season 2 Episode 20, June 2026.
"Where Science Moves Progress Follows," video interview on global scientific mobility and innovation, Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), April 2025 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-2dKmw1-mM
“The Impact of the War in Ukraine on Science and Universities,” VoxEU.org (with Fabian Waldinger), August 2023.
“War and science in Ukraine,” VoxEU Talk, interviewed by Tim Phillips, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), 13 October 2023 — https://cepr.org/multimedia/war-and-science-ukraine
“Ukrainian science is struggling, threatening long-term economic recovery,” The Conversation (with M. Rose, O. Ivashchenko and S. Baruffaldi), July 2023.
“Embracing the gift of global talent,” IMF Finance & Development Magazine (with R. Agarwal and P. Gaulé), Spring 2021.
“Around the world in the legal profession: Women get in, but not up,” VoxEU.org (with R. Hausmann and M. Viarengo), July 2020.
Selected Working Papers / Current Research
Ganguli, I. and Murciano-Goroff, R., 2026. “Minimum Wages and Entry into Scientific Careers: Evidence from University Research Labs,” Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics (NBER Working Paper No. w34244).
Ganguli, I., Lin, J., Meursault, V. and Reynolds, N.F., 2026. “Spreading Out Across Expanding Idea Space,” NBER Working Paper.
Professional Links
Selected Publications
Aloud, M. E., Al-Rashood, S., Ganguli, I., & Zafar, B. (2026). Information and Social Norms: Experimental Evidence on the Labor Market Aspirations of Saudi Women. Economic Development and Cultural Change. Forthcoming.
Fry, C., & Ganguli, I. (2026). Return on Returns: Building Scientific Capacity in AIDS Endemic Countries. Health Economics. https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.70079
Burrage, A., Dasgupta, N., & Ganguli, I. (2025). Gender Diversity in Academic Entrepreneurship: Social Impact Motives and the NSF I-Corps Program. Research Policy, 54(3), 105169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2024.105169
Ganguli, I., Haidar, J. I., Khwaja, A. I., Stemper, S., & Zafar, B. (2024). Economic Shocks and Skill Acquisition: Evidence from a National Online Learning Platform at the Onset of COVID-19. Labour Economics, 88, 102575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102575
Agarwal, R., Ganguli, I., Gaulé, P., & Smith, G. (2023). Why U.S. Immigration Matters for the Global Advancement of Science. Research Policy, 52(1), 104659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2022.104659
Choudhury, P., Ganguli, I., & Gaulé, P. (2023). Top Talent, Elite Colleges, And Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology. Journal of Development Economics, 164, 103120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120
Burrage, A., Ciemiecki, J., Couch, S., & Ganguli, I. (2022). Inclusive Pathways to Invention: Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Collegiate Student Inventors in a National Prize Competition. Technology & Innovation, 22(3), 341–357. https://doi.org/10.21300/22.3.2022.8
Ganguli, I., Gaulé, P., & Vuletić Čugalj, D. (2022). Chasing the Academic Dream: Biased Beliefs and Scientific Labor Markets. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 202, 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.021
Ganguli, I., Hausmann, R., & Viarengo, M. (2021). Gender Differences in Professional Career Dynamics: New Evidence From a Global Law Firm. Economica, 88(349), 105–128. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12342
Ganguli, I., Huysentruyt, M., & Le Coq, C. (2021). Do Nascent Social Entrepreneurs Respond to Rewards? A Field Experiment on Motivations in a Grant Competition. Management Science, 67(10), 6294–6316. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3793
Lane, J., Ganguli, I., Gaulé, P., Guinan, E., & Lakhani, K. R. (2021). Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production? Strategic Management Journal, 42(6), 1215–1244. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3256
Ganguli, I., Lin, J., & Reynolds, N. (2020). The Paper Trail of Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence From Patent Interferences. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(2), 278–302. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20180017
Prokopovych, B., & Ganguli, I. (2022). Social Artrepreneurship and Collectives: Lessons For Social Entrepreneurs From the Wanderers Art Movement in Imperial Russia. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 13(2), 278–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2020.1779788