Catherine Hafer is an associate professor of politics at New York University. Her primary fields are political economy, applied game theory, and American politics. She received her BS in economics at the California Institute of Technology and PhD in political science at the University of Rochester.
Her research focuses on the properties of incentives created by diverse social, legal, and political institutions and on the emergence and maintenance of such institutions in dynamic economic and political environments. Her recent work has focused on property rights and authority in weakly institutionalized settings, incentives for lobbying and campaign contributions, and determinants of informative communication in different institutional and political environments.
Her work has appeared in a number of leading political science and economics journals, including the American Political Science Review, Review of Economic Studies, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and others.