Max Kagan

Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Management at Columbia Business School. 

I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market. You can find my job market paper here and read about my other research here.

I study how political partisanship and ideology affect business performance using a variety of quantitative empirical techniques, including experiments and analysis of large-scale administrative and commercial data. Much of my research uses voter file data to measure employees' partisanship and understand how this affects organizational outcomes.

I have a Ph.D. 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 in private equity focused on growth-stage investments in financial technology and business services, and for 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.