Katharina Pistor studied law in Freiburg, Germany and London (UK) as well as public policy at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard). She serves as the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School in New York, and is one of three co-directors of Columbia University’s Center on Political Economy, where she heads the money-and-finance lab. Her research and teaching spans corporate law, the law of non-capitalist enterprises, money and finance, property rights, comparative law and law and development. After spending the early stages of her career researching the transformation of the former socialist countries, she turned to the legal foundations of capitalism. She is the author of “A Legal Theory of Finance” (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2013), and “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality” (Princeton University Press, 2019), which has been translated into eight languages. In 2012, she was awarded, jointly with Martin Hellweg, the Max Planck Research Award on international financial regulation and is the recipient of additional grants by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the National Science Foundation. Pistor is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg and the European Academies of Science, a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and a former fellow of the Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She loves the arts and in her spare time plays the harpsichord.
Katherina Pistor, Columbia professor
