Max Kagan

Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Management | Columbia Business School

My research focuses on the causes and consequences of political polarization in the workplace and how politics affects business. My current research focus is on developing new measures of employee political polarization and applying these to understand how employee partisanship affects employee, businesses, and society at large. I am also interested in understanding when and why companies take public stances on controversial political and social issues and stakeholders view these actions. I use a variety of quantitative empirical techniques including big data, field experiments, and survey experiments.

Currently, I am a postdoc at Columbia Business School, where I work with Vanessa Burbano and am associated with LEAP, an National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (STC).

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. 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.