Experts and Staff

Lara Merling is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC. She previously worked at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and as an advisor for the International Trade Union Confederation which represents over 200 million workers worldwide. Her past projects include co-founding and managing “Economic Questions”, a pluralist economics blog, where she was both an editor and contributor.

A dual citizen of the US and Romania, Lara’s education spans the two places she calls home. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Bard College, an M.S. in Economic Policy and Theory from the Levy Economics Institute, and is now finishing her Ph.D. dissertation at the Bucharest University of Economics, in her home country of Romania. Lara’s research interests include issues around sovereign debt, industrial policy, sustainable development, and policies that can support a just transition to a net-zero economy. Her work frequently engages with the devastating social and economic effects of austerity policies and the logical fallacies that underpin these prescriptions. Her work has been featured by media outlets such as Reuters, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Intercept, openDemocracy, Vox, and The Hill.