2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Natalie Carlson, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Natalie Carlson
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania 

“Professor Carlson is one of very few management scholars working at the intersection of emerging markets strategy, human capital development, and AI/ML methods, a combination that positions her to address some of the most consequential questions in global business today.  She is running or piloting field experiments across four countries on three continents. She created a novel MBA and undergraduate course on emerging firms that consistently fills to capacity and has received the Wharton Teaching Excellence Award every year since joining the faculty. Her research partnerships with organizations like Arukay (a Colombian ed-tech company) and Bandhan Bank (one of India’s largest microfinance institutions) demonstrate meaningful real-world impact.” – Wharton Dean’s Office

Natalie A. Carlson, 38, is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines strategy and entrepreneurship in emerging economies, with a particular focus on microenterprises and the informal economy. Her research has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal and draws on a combination of field experiments and computational methods, with ongoing projects in Colombia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, and India, conducted in partnership with NGOs, firms, and government agencies. 

At Wharton, Carlson developed and teaches Global Growth of Emerging Firms, a parallel undergraduate and MBA elective on how firms scale and innovate across developing and emerging economies. Her teaching has been recognized with five Wharton Teaching Excellence Awards. She is a founding member of the Management in Emerging Markets Consortium and co-organizer of the Management, Analytics, and Data (M.A.D.) Conference, and serves on the editorial review boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science. 

Carlson received her Ph.D. in Management from Columbia Business School and holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2020 

Education: Ph.D. in Management, Columbia Business School (2021) 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: MGMT 8170: Global Growth of Emerging Firms 

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …  I’m not sure there was one singular moment; I ended up here through a series of happy accidents. Like many academics, my entry point was the research – but the first time I saw one of my advisors teach an MBA class, I realized I was getting myself into another challenge entirely. Fortunately, that challenge has been immensely rewarding! 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? I have a number of different field experiments in process. One I’m particularly excited about is a large study we’re piloting in collaboration with a microfinance bank in India. The bank is interested to know what will happen if they encourage loan repayments to happen via UPI QR codes – India’s wildly successful digital payments infrastructure – instead of in cash. The interesting tension is that digital payments might be more convenient, but they could also undermine the group dynamics that form the social architecture of the microfinance model. In our pilot study, what we’ve seen is that the first to adopt the QR repayment have been those who are already behind on payments. The question is whether it can serve as a recovery channel for those loans, or as an avoidance channel, pushing people further into non-recoverable debt. We will be scaling up the study to roughly 1,700 branches across five states in India this summer: half will be randomly assigned to roll out the QR repayments, while half will have that capability frozen. I had great fun soliciting predictions from my MBA students about what we’re going to find.  

If I weren’t a business school professor… in my dream world, I’d be a singer (classical or jazz). Realistically, I’d probably have ended up as a data scientist or working in policy. 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? In my MBA class, I invite the students to give short presentations on a session day that’s relevant to their experience – for example, in this year’s energy session we had a student who had worked on expanding the electricity grid in East Africa; in our sessions on fintech and financial inclusion we had students present about their experience working in global remittances or studying the gold loan lending industry in India; and in our session about geopolitical risk a student talked about his family’s manufacturing business and how they are navigating tariff policy. I find this brings great energy to the room, and helps foster connections – the students often don’t know about their classmates’ experience, even if they are friendly socially! 

In general, I just really enjoy getting to know the students. They are endlessly interesting, smart, and hilarious. I get such a kick out of all the personalities that come through my room.  

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: That it’s somewhere between two and three different jobs, each requiring completely distinct skills, all mashed into one role. It’s demanding and wonderful. 

Professor I most admire and why: I was lucky to be mentored by a great network at Columbia, including Bruce Kogut, Vanessa Burbano, Dan Wang, and Stephan Meier. They modeled for me intellectual courage, efficiency, generosity, and excellence in research and in the classroom. The senior faculty in the Multinational Management area here at Wharton have also been wonderful mentors to me (Vit Henisz, Mauro Guillen, Martine Haas, and Zeke Hernandez). I have the sense that as your career goes on, it is not easy to juggle research focus, practical impact, and mentorship of junior scholars – but they manage to do it! 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? They are optimistic, energetic, and almost always have something interesting to say. 

What is most challenging? Each student comes into the course with a different background and different goals. It’s very difficult to strike exactly the right note for everyone with 70+ students in the classroom. I try to provide levels of engagement – e.g., by including a long optional reading list, knowing only a handful will tackle it in full – and keep mandatory assignments flexible, so students can apply them to their specific interests. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… generous, within reason. 

 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? Spending time with my family, studying languages, going to the gym, reading. At some point later in life I hope to pick up some of my artistic hobbies again. 

How will you spend your summer? May and June are busy with conference and seminar travel: a number of short trips to Ithaca, St. Louis, New York, and Montreal, a brief detour for a good friend’s wedding, then a conference in Copenhagen. My husband and son will join me, and we’re planning on heading down to Athens and a couple of lesser-known Greek islands for ten days. Then back to Philadelphia for the rest of the summer to hunker down on research. And my son starts kindergarten in the fall, so we need to get him ready for that! 

Favorite place(s) to vacation: Always somewhere new! I can’t sit on a beach for more than a day before getting restless. I like walking around new cities, and I love the mountains (hiking in the summer, skiing in the winter). I’m not into super-luxury experiences per se, but I do appreciate good design and a room with a view. 

Favorite book(s): I read mostly fiction. A few recent favorites have been What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Nicked by M.T. Anderson. I love authors that blend genres and forms, like Emily St. John Mandel and David Mitchell. 

While not a habitual poetry reader, I do appreciate lyrical prose. I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire when I was young and it had a big impact on me. I picked up a paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities when I was on vacation somewhere and found it to be singularly lovely. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was a similar experience. 

For fun, I reach for spy novels and mysteries. Le Carre, Tana French. I grew up reading my mom’s dog-eared Agatha Christie collection and I will still pick one up when I need a comfort read. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? Keeping on the spy theme, my favorite thing on TV right now is Slow Horses. It’s about a fictional division of M15 where they send the incompetents. I could watch Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas banter all day. The book series it is based on (by Mick Herron) is also terrific fun.  

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? Instrumental music for deep focus work – particularly baroque era, like Bach and Vivaldi. The musical phrases are intricate but predictable, which I find to be the right mix of stimulating without distracting. 

For fun I like all kinds of pop music, hip hop, Latin, Afrobeats. One of my favorite artists is Rosalia; I’ve had her album LUX on repeat since it came out last fall. It’s a pop album, but with heavy influences from classical orchestral, opera, and sacred choral music, in addition to her usual reggaeton and flamenco influences. My husband and I are planning a getaway weekend with some friends to Mexico City to catch one of her shows at the end of the summer. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… I think virtually every level of education could benefit from more coursework on causal reasoning and causal inference.  

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… thinking long-term about human capital in the AI transition. Two things in particular: we’re automating away a lot of the entry-level work where people used to develop judgment, and I worry about where the next generation of experienced talent comes from. At the same time, AI has made it trivial to generate analyses but no easier to know which ones to trust; this means causal-reasoning literacy is more important than ever, and most organizations underinvest in it (see above!). 

I’m grateful for… every day with my family, and every day I get to do this job.  

 

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

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