Hi! I’m Karsen, and I care deeply about tackling big questions in policy and economics. I am particularly interested in the economics of AI.

I currently spend my time:

• Designing markets under Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom at Auctionomics, including a market for compute.
• Researching the economics of AI with Professor Neale Mahoney.

I recently graduated from Stanford with a B.A. with Honors in Economics, B.S. in Mathematics, and M.S. in Computer Science (with a specialization in AI), where I was fortunate to be advised by Professors Nicholas Bloom and Pete Klenow.

My past experiences have spanned startups (market design and AI at ReadyOn AI, benefits delivery at Propel), academia (ranked-choice voting (pending publication), macroeconomic theory at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, econometric theory, state debt structures), and policy (U.S. Treasury, End Poverty in California, the office of U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, Millennium Challenge Corporation). I’ve taken graduate-level coursework in microeconomics, machine learning, market design, labor economics, economic history, natural language processing, econometrics, graph neural networks, Markov decision processes, causal inference, and optimization.

In my free time, you can catch me reading (anything and everything!), volunteering for political causes I care about (see: Stanford Abundance, Abundant San Francisco, Haas Center for Public Service), climbing mountains (mountaineering, backpacking, climbing, hiking, you name it!), or traveling. I love meeting new people; feel free to reach out at kwahal@stanford.edu!