Professor Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Directrice d'études (Full Professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, positions she has held since 2010. In 2026–27 she is visiting London School of Economics as BP Centennial Professor in the Department of Management. She is also CEPR Research Fellow. Since 2023 she has served as a coeditor of the American Economic Review.

Zhuravskaya is an empirical political economist. Her research asks how beliefs are formed and how they shape social, political, and economic outcomes, and centres on two connected themes: political persuasion across traditional media, social media, and most recently AI; and economic history, in particular how institutions, policies, social environments, and historical shocks leave lasting imprints on beliefs and norms. Related strands of her work examine the origins of ethnic conflict, corruption, and propaganda. She works with causal methods at the intersection of economics, political science, and sociology.

She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1999, following an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics (1994). Before moving to Paris in 2010, she spent thirteen years at the New Economic School in Moscow, rising from Assistant Professor (2000) to Full Professor (2006). Previously, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and held distinguished visiting positions at Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and King's Business School, King's College London.

Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Warwick, the Birgit Grodal Award of the European Economic Association, the CNRS Silver Medal, and the George Gamow Award. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association.

Professor Zhuravskaya's primary research interests include:

• Social media and platform algorithms. How feed-ranking algorithms, network structure, and the design of online platforms shape political attitudes, polarization, and behaviour as well as well-being and mental health.
• Misinformation, fact-checking, and belief updating. How false claims spread, when corrections work, and how to amplify accurate information rather than merely suppress false information.
• AI and persuasion. The emerging role of AI-generated and AI-mediated content in forming political beliefs.
• Media, propaganda, and censorship. The political effects of traditional and digital media, including state propaganda, censorship, and the selective reporting of conflict.
• Economic history of beliefs and norms. How institutions, policies, historical shocks, and social environments leave lasting imprints on culture, norms, and political preferences.
• Ethnic conflict, identity, and nation-building. The origins of inter-group violence and the policies that build or fracture national identity.
• Political economy of development. Corruption, state capture, fiscal and political decentralization, and the quality of government.