About the Authors
At Harvard Business School, Aldo Musacchio and Eric Werker designed a course on strategies to understand and succeed in frontier economies (called Globalization and Emerging Markets) in which they examined the challenges and opportunities firms faced in these markets. Their course covered topics ranging from agribusiness, mining, banking, energy, political risk, oil and gas, financial markets, and intellectual property.
Eric Werker is an Associate Professor in the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He teaches about emerging markets, strategy, governance, and global economics to MBAs and executives and has authored numerous case studies on companies and countries around the world. Werker's research has been published in leading economics and political science journals and he has written for wider audiences through outlets including Financial Times, New York Times, and Foreign Policy. You can view his new paper on frontier economies in the Harvard Business Review.
Outside of academia, Werker is the academic chair of the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute at the University of British Columbia, senior advisor to the Liberia program of the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics, and a member of the advisory group of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He previously served as economic advisor to the President of Liberia and worked for the US Government's Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Werker grew up in Vancouver, earned his A.B. and Ph.D in economics at Harvard, and then spent nearly a decade on the faculty of Harvard Business School before returning home. He has traveled to or worked in over 60 countries.
Aldo Musacchio is an Associate Professor of Management and Economics at the International Business School and the Department of Economics of Brandeis University. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Prior to joining Brandeis, Prof. Musacchio was an associate professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), where he taught for ten years. He has a Ph. D. from Stanford University and a B.A. in Economics with highest honors from ITAM in Mexico City. He has written three books and numerous academic papers looking at how firms adapt to adverse institutional environments, in frontier and emerging markets, and also examining how firms in emerging markets use and abuse the support governments give to national champions.
Together with Prof. Sergio G. Lazzarini, of Insper in Sao Paulo, he has a series of academic papers and the book Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond (Harvard University Press, 2014), in which they examine the performance implications of different governance arrangements in state-owned enterprises and the effects that investments and loans from development banks have on the performance of private and state-owned firms. Professor Musacchio has worked with a variety of state owned enterprises and banks in China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Argentina, and Oman. He runs a consulting firm that advises governments in frontier and emerging markets on state-owned enterprise reform, usually in cooperation with the OECD, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.