People
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jlerner@pcrinstitute.orgJosh Lerner
Director
Josh Lerner is the Director of the PCRI and Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management Areas. He graduated from Yale College with a Special Divisional Major that combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department. Read more...
Much of his research focuses on the structure and role of venture capital and private equity organizations. (This research is collected in three books, The Venture Capital Cycle, The Money of Invention, and Boulevard of Broken Dreams.) He also examines policies towards innovation, and how they impact firm strategies. (The research is discussed in the books Innovation and Its Discontents, The Comingled Code, and the forthcoming Architecture of Innovation.) He co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Productivity, Research, and Innovation Program and serves as co-editor of their publication, Innovation Policy and the Economy. He founded and runs the Private Capital Research Institute, a non-profit devoted to encouraging data access to and research about venture capital and private equity. In the 1993-94 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs on private equity finance. In recent years, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, now in its fifth edition, and the textbook Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Financing of Entrepreneurship.) He also teaches a doctoral course on entrepreneurship and in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and organizes executive courses on private equity in Boston and Beijing. He is the winner of the Swedish government’s 2010 Global Entrepreneurship Research Award and has recently been named one of the 100 most influential people in private equity over the past decade by Private Equity International magazine. Hide
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ljeng@pcrinstitute.orgLeslie Jeng
Director of Research
Leslie Jeng is Director of Research of the Private Capital Research Institute and the Charles Williams Fellow at the Harvard Business School. She has been with the PCRI since its inception. Prior to joining the PCRI, Leslie was an assistant professor of Finance and Economics at Boston University School of Management and taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her areas of interests are Corporate Finance, Financial Institutions and Regulation, International Finance, and Public Policy. Read more...
Her publications include “The determinants of venture capital funding: An empirical analysis,” Journal of Corporate Finance 2000 and “Estimating the Returns to Insider Trading: A Performance-Evaluation Perspective,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 2003. Also, Leslie has worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and quantitative investment research at Arrowstreet Capital. Leslie received her BS and BA degrees in Finance and Mathematics from the Wharton School/University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. Hide
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Gitanjali Swamy
Research Associate
Dr. Swamy joined the PCRI in 2016 as a Research Fellow. Dr. Swamy received her B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the IIT Kanpur, where she was awarded Academic Proficiency Prizes, her Ph.D. in EECS at U.C. Berkeley, where she was an NSF Fellow & President of WICSE, and her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she served as CFO of HBS-SA. She has nearly 25 publications and patents in the fields of data, algorithms, technology and policy.
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byang@hbs.eduBohan Yang
Research Associate
Bohan Yang is a Research Associate for the Project on Impact Investments and Private Capital Project at Harvard Business School. His research interests include political economy, economics of innovation, and development economics. He is passionate about using causal inference methods and novel data to answer the big questions in social sciences rigorously. Bohan holds an M.A. in Social Science with a concentration in Economics from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Economics from Renmin University of China.
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nli@hbs.eduNancy Li
Research Associate
Nancy Li is a Research Associate for the Project on Impact Investments and Private Capital Project at Harvard Business School. Her interest lies at the intersection of business and technology. She is committed to building robust datasets to enable downstream data analytics capabilities and support data-driven business decisions. She is passionate about using quantitative methods, such as causal inference and machine learning, to address business challenges. Nancy completed her MS in Data Science at Harvard University and BASc in Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto.
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hliu@hbs.eduHaitian Liu
Research Associate
Haitian Liu is a Research Associate for the Project on Impact Investments at Harvard Business School. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Data Science at Harvard University, having completed a double major in Applied Mathematics and Data Science at UC Berkeley. Haitian is proficient in several areas including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision.