Max Kagan
Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Management | Columbia Business School
My Research
My research seeks to understand how politics affects business and vice versa. Some of the questions I'm currently working on are:
Are Republicans and Democrats segregated in the workplace? Are they more likely to encounter members of the other party at work than in other places? How does this segregation emerge? Is it the result of deliberate sorting by individuals, or mostly incidental to other factors?
How do customers and employees react when companies become politicized? When companies become associated with a controversial political issue, sometimes companies face boycotts, employee activism, and other negative consequences---and sometimes they don't. What explains this variation?
To answer these questions, I use a variety of quantitative empirical techniques, including experiments and analysis of large-scale administrative and commercial data.
Background
I have a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to my graduate studies, I worked for several years at McKinsey & Company, where I was based in Dubai and in New York City. I also worked as a private equity investor focused on business services and financial technology and for the the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit that partners with companies in retail, elder care, and other service industries to create good jobs that enrich the lives of workers while also working towards improving business operations.
