Dr. Ioana Marinescu has been promoted to full professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2), effective July 1, 2026. 

“I am grateful to the School, to my colleagues, and to my collaborators for their support. Encouragement and constructive criticism have helped me learn and grow along the way. I am energized by research and policy ideas, and I am looking forward to better understanding the impact of AI on the economy and society, and to helping design solutions for a better tomorrow,” says Marinescu. 

Marinescu is a leading economist whose research examines how labor markets, market power, and technological change shape wages, employment, and inequality. She holds secondary appointments in Penn’s Department of Economics and the Wharton School (Business Economics and Public Policy Department) and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Her scholarship has been especially influential in advancing understanding of monopsony power in labor markets and its policy implications. Marinescu testified before Congress on labor market competition and served as principal economist in the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division from 2022 to 2024, where she helped integrate labor market considerations into the 2023 Merger Guidelines, the first to explicitly address impacts on workers. 

Marinescu contributes to public and policy conversations on the future of work and artificial intelligence. She serves on Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Council and provides expert insight to policymakers, journalists, and business leaders on issues at the intersection of labor markets, antitrust, and emerging technologies. She is also an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and her research has been published in leading outlets including the Review of Economic Studies. 

“Dr. Marinescu’s promotion to full professor recognizes her outstanding contributions as a scholar whose research is shaping national and global policy on wages, employment, labor markets, antitrust, and emerging technologies, as well as her deep commitment to teaching and mentoring students,” says SP2 Dean Dr. Sara S. Bachman. “Through both her scholarship and her leadership of the MSSP program, she exemplifies SP2’s mission to drive meaningful change.”  

Marinescu joined the SP2 faculty in 2017 and currently serves as director of the Master of Science in Social Policy (MSSP) program. In recognition of this milestone, we asked Marinescu a few questions about her time at SP2, her research, and what’s ahead. 

How has your research evolved since joining SP2? 

After I joined SP2, I had the opportunity to meet with colleagues on the East Coast, which eventually led to a new line of research about how competing employers can help workers obtain higher wages and better working conditions. This research eventually led to my two years at the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division, where I worked on promoting competition in the American economy.  

During my time at the DOJ, ChatGPT came out, and I immediately became fascinated with this new technology and its promises and risks for workers and the broader economy. This new line of inquiry built on my prior work on electrification and the social safety net, and led to my work advising Anthropic, the maker of Claude. 

Much of your work focuses on labor markets, antitrust, and artificial intelligence. What questions are you most interested in answering right now? 

We are at a critical juncture in the development of AI technology. While the impact of AI on labor markets has been limited so far, it will likely become more significant as jobs are restructured to take advantage of the new technology. I am interested in how we can protect workers and citizens from the potentially disruptive effects of AI, while harnessing the many benefits of AI, e.g. to raise productivity and advance academic research, and to improve the delivery of public services and the design of public policies. 

You’ve worked at the Department of Justice and now advise Anthropic. How have these roles shaped your academic research and policy perspective? 

My work at the DOJ helped me understand the interaction between different disciplinary approaches to a policy problem: in this case, lawyers and economists must collaborate closely to understand how we can promote competition, leading to lower prices for consumers and higher wages for workers. 

By advising Anthropic, I have learned how private companies can produce data and research that inform public policy, bringing their unique technical knowledge to bear on the broader social questions.  

What do you enjoy most about teaching and mentoring students at SP2? 

At SP2, we have an incredible set of students with different disciplinary backgrounds and coming from different countries, and they are all united by the desire to make a positive impact on society. I am grateful I get to teach them tools to help them think about how to change the world, and our discussions enrich my own thinking. For example, this past year, I taught a new course on AI and public policy, which discussed how we can use AI to make better policy. The students came with different perspectives on the use of AI, based on their own knowledge and life experiences.