Zunda Winston Xu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. My research interests are the economics of innovation and regulation.

My research on innovation focuses on how firms organize innovative activity and choose which technological directions to pursue. I study how firm boundaries and financial markets shape these decisions, and how firms’ innovation choices affect the diffusion of knowledge and technology beyond the firm.

My research on regulation studies the determinants and consequences of regulatory decision-making. In antitrust and financial regulation, I study how regulators’ objectives and political incentives shape policy design and enforcement, and how regulatory decisions affect market structure, firm behavior, and household welfare.

Before Stanford, I received a master's in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago. Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I also worked as a research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.