Scholarship and Biography
Aldo Musacchio is the Carl J. Shapiro Professor of International Finance, Director of the MBA Program and of the Perlmutter Institute for Global Leadership at Brandeis University. He also leads both the Brazil and the Latin America Initiatives at the School of Business and Economics, Brandeis University. He specializes on financial history, corporate governance; innovation policy; industrial policy; and state-owned enterprise reform, among other topics. Prof. Musacchio teaches Strategy and Entrepreneurship for graduate students and Competitive Strategy (in technology firms) for undergraduate students. He is the co-editor of Financial History Review and is a Research Associate of the Development of the American Economy Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
His current policy and research agenda centers on the evolving role of the state in shaping global competition, innovation, and firm performance. In a context marked by the resurgence of industrial policy and nationalist economic strategies, his work examines how government support—through ownership, subsidies, and development finance—affects the competitive dynamics between public and private firms. Building on over a decade of empirical research on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), he investigates the home-country advantages these firms enjoy, particularly in terms of access to capital and implicit guarantees. Recent projects include studies on the corporate governance transformation of SOEs, the impact of minority state ownership on firm behavior, and the advantages conferred by national development banks such as BNDES. His work contributes to ongoing debates about fair competition in international business and informs policy discussions about state involvement in the economy.
A key area of focus in his current research is the relationship between government support and innovation. He has led comparative studies across countries showing that government ownership is associated with increased innovation inputs—such as patent filings and originality—though innovation outcomes depend heavily on institutional features like executive constraints. He is also investigating the U.S. model of state-driven innovation, with a particular focus on DARPA’s role in catalyzing breakthrough technologies. In collaboration with Debarshi Nandy, he has constructed the largest database to date on DARPA funding by recipient and is analyzing how program managers’ backgrounds influence innovation outcomes in firms and academic institutions. This work fills a critical gap in the literature on mission-oriented innovation policy and underpins current funding proposals to the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Beyond academia, Musacchio is a leading expert on state-owned enterprise reform, climate change engagement in state firms, and fiscal risk mitigation stemming from these firms, both at the InterAmerican Development Bank (Fiscal Management Division) and at the Infrastructure Group of the World Bank.
Before joining IBS Prof. Musacchio was an Associate Professor and Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, as part of the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit (BGIE). Musacchio has a B.A. in economics (with highest honors) from ITAM, in Mexico, and an M.A. and Ph. D. in Economic History of Latin America from Stanford University. In 2012, he won the Manuel Espinosa Yglesias Prize for his research on foreign banks in Mexico (together with Stephen Haber) and was awarded the 2012 Prize for Professional/Academic Merit by the Alumni Association of ITAM (EX-ITAM). Prior to that he won the Cole Prize for the Best Paper in the Journal of Economic History (2008) and the European Banking History Association's Feldman Prize for the best paper by a young scholar.
His teaching experience includes executive education at Harvard Business School, where he led the Building Business in Emerging Markets Program, FGV-YPO Program, the IPADE-INALDE Latin AMerican Management Program, TEC de Monterrey, ESE Chile, YPO Latin America, and the Advanced Management Program at Reykjavik University.