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. 

On innovation, I focus on how firms organize innovative activities and choose which technological directions to pursue. More specifically, 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. 

On regulation, I explore the determinants and consequences of regulatory decision-making. For example, in antitrust and financial regulation, I examine 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.