Max Kagan

About

Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Management at Columbia Business School. In 2026, I was also named an Affiliate Fellow of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

My Research

I study politics at work. Societies around the world are increasingly marked by political polarization. My research seeks to understand how politics at work affects (a) firms' strategy and performance, (b) employees' careers, and (c) democracy and society as a whole. Some of the topics I have studied include:

• What firms and industries have more Democrats versus Republicans, and how politically segregated are workers?
• How do firms' organizational cultures affect workers' civic engagement and participation in democracy?
• How do firms' political stances shape employee retention and turnover?

My research has been published or is forthcoming in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Nature Human Behaviour, and is under review at Management Science (revise and resubmit).

Background

I completed my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Before graduate school, I worked at McKinsey & Company in Dubai and New York, as a private equity investor, and at the Good Jobs Institute.

The Politics at Work Initiative

I am one of the co-leads of the Politics at Work Initiative, which links voter registration records for tens of millions of workers to their employment histories. The resulting data provide the broadest and deepest view yet of how and why political partisanship matters for firms, workers, and society. You can explore our publicly-available data and discover the partisan makeup of organizations, occupations, and industries.