Alma Cohen

Alma Cohen is Professor of Empirical Practice, and Traphagen Senior Fellow in Law and Economics, at Harvard Law School. She also serves as Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Performance, Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and faculty members at the Tel-Aviv University Berglas School of Economics. Professor Cohen is an applied empirical economist, who has done work on a wide range of topics in the areas of law and economics, regulation, public economics, corporate governance, and risk and insurance. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the Harvard Economics Department, as well as a B.A. in Mathematics and an M.SC in Management and Operations Research from Tel-Aviv University.

Professor Cohen’s research has been published in leading journals in economics including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the American Economic Journal: Policy; leading journals in finance, including the Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies; and leading journals in law and economics, including the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Legal Analysis. Her research has been discussed by articles in, among other places, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times, U.S. News and World Report, The Atlantic, Forbes, Businessweek, and Newsweek. The Social Science Network (SSRN) ranked her (as of the beginning of 2026) as ninth among law school faculty members in all fields in terms of citations to their work.