2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Elena Prager, Simon Business School, University of Rochester

 

Elena Prager
Simon Business School
University of Rochester

“I had the unusual opportunity to experience her teaching both as a colleague at the University of Rochester (I am a Professor of Chemistry at Rochester) and as a student in her MBA Data Analytics course, and this dual perspective makes her effectiveness particularly clear. Her ability to communicate sophisticated analytical ideas with clarity, intuition, and real-world relevance is remarkable. She consistently blends rigorous quantitative reasoning with practical examples drawn from business and policy, making complex material accessible to students from widely varied professional and academic backgrounds. What distinguishes Professor Prager most is her deeply thoughtful pedagogy: she designs her courses around real-world problem solving rather than rote memorization, and she actively connects classroom concepts to how analytics is used in industry – even bringing in former students to link in-class concepts to real-world problems being solved in data analytics.

“As a faculty member who manages a large research group and million-dollar+ annual budget, I enrolled in MBA courses to strengthen my own understanding of management and analytics. Of the courses I have taken, Professor Prager’s had the greatest influence not only on my understanding of data analytics but also on my own approach to teaching. Her methods of structuring discussion, framing quantitative concepts intuitively, and integrating practical applications have directly shaped how I now design and teach my own courses.” – Michael T. Ruggiero

Elena Prager, 36, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Prager’s research uses large datasets to study practical questions about how markets operate and how to design public policy to improve their outcomes, with a focus on labor markets and health care markets. Her recent work explores topics such as the effect of employer market power through both legal employer behaviors (mergers) and illegal employer behaviors (collusion), as well as hospital pricing and health insurance design. It has been published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. 

Prager’s research is relevant for policy and for the business community. It has appeared numerous times in government documents and Congressional testimony, as well as being covered by popular media including Freakonomics, the New York Times, and NPR. Her research has won funding or awards from Arnold Ventures, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, American Economic Association, National Institute for Health Care Management, CRESSE, and others. Prager’s expertise is regularly sought out by both private companies and the government.

Previously, Prager taught and conducted research at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. 

BACKGROUND

At current institution since what year? 2022

Education: PhD in Managerial Sciences and Applied Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: Data Analytics (core MBA course)

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when … I realized the power of data-driven economics to improve the world by helping us design better government policy and business decisions.

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? I study labor markets—the markets in which workers get matched to jobs and employers—using economic models that were originally developed to explain markets for goods and services. Economists and policy-makers have long understood that companies can have meaningful market power in goods and services, but used to think labor markets were pretty close to perfectly competitive. My recent work is part of a larger literature that shows this isn’t true: employers also often have market power that allows them to suppress the quality or pay of jobs, just like market power can allow a company to worsen its value proposition to consumers. This work has contributed to a sea change in how government policy tools for regulating market power are applied to labor markets.

If I weren’t a business school professor… I probably wouldn’t have moved away from Toronto, my wonderful adopted hometown.

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I am every inch a data nerd, so my excitement in the classroom is the real deal!

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: There are amazing opportunities to engage with the outside world that aren’t available in most academic fields.

Professor I most admire and why: You can’t make me pick among my colleagues! Taking a historical perspective, Joan Robinson was a Cambridge economist who did prescient work on labor market power way back in the 1930s.

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? When they email me a year or two later to share how they’re using the data tools we learned to do their jobs better.

What is most challenging? Overcoming students’ fear of math.

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Fair, if a little intimidating at first.

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM

What are your hobbies? I’m an unskilled but enthusiastic hiker, and the Rochester region is full of lovely lakes, waterfalls, and autumn leaf-peeping.

How will you spend your summer? Doing research and the occasional hike (see above).

Favorite place(s) to vacation: Anywhere with good food and natural beauty. Bonus points if there are both mountains and bodies of water involved.

Favorite book(s): That’s too hard. But I’m a big fan of Brian Greene’s books on quantum physics and cosmology for a general audience.

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? As my students already know, I think The Great British Bake-Off is the Platonic ideal of a TV show. It’s just so heart-warming and low-stakes.

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? Old-school Broadway and mildly obscure choral music.

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… Smaller class sizes (but this is very hard to scale in practice).

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… More thoughtful, less indiscriminate AI deployment.

I’m grateful for… The community that got me this far and continues to sustain me. 

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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