A CIRANO Associate Researcher since 2012, Luba Petersen is Associate Professor of economics in the Department of Economics at the Simon Fraser University.

Holding a Ph.D in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, her research focuses on expectations and decision making in macroeconomic environments. She develops procedures for implementing macroeconomies in controlled laboratory experiments to study policy-relevant questions.

Her recent research investigates the ability of monetary policy and central bank communication to stabilize and guide expectations and markets. She is currently studying the determinants of effective communication to the general public as well as financial markets. Another branch of her work explores how people reason through dynamic optimization problems and whether their ability can be improved through effective tools and education.

These projects have been funded by various institutions and programs including the Bank of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Sury Initative for Global Finance and International Risk Management, SSHRC-SFU Institutional Grants, as well as SSHRC Insight Development and Insight Grants.