This event is online only.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Studies Program at New York University for the second session of the series “Ukraine in Focus,” featuring Yuriy Gorodnichenko. Moderated by Anastasiia Vlasenko.
Ukraine in Focus is a public webinar series on war, society, and politics in contemporary Ukraine, co-sponsored by the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Twelve sessions across the 2026–2027 academic year pair an invited speaker with a faculty moderator, followed by open audience questions. Sessions are scheduled at midday Eastern, evening in Kyiv, so that speakers based in Ukraine can take part live. Moderated by Anastasiia Vlasenko, Visiting Assistant Professor in Ukrainian Studies at NYU. See the full schedule.
How does an economy keep functioning while under sustained attack — and what does “stabilization” even mean when the underlying assumption of peacetime economics, that the state controls its own territory and infrastructure, no longer holds? In this session, Yuriy Gorodnichenko examines the macroeconomic policy choices that have kept Ukraine’s economy on a sustainable footing through more than three years of full-scale war. Since 2022, Gorodnichenko has led the Ukraine Initiative at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), coordinating rapid-response economic analysis from leading international economists. He co-authored Macroeconomic Policies for Wartime Ukraine, one of the first systematic frameworks for wartime fiscal and monetary policy, built on the premise that Ukraine’s crisis is not a conventional macroeconomic adjustment problem: the country’s survival, and Europe’s security, are the actual constraints any policy must serve. He has since co-authored Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and Policies and led the development of a post-war macroeconomic framework assessing the scale of wartime damage and the policy architecture needed for recovery. This session will draw on that body of work to address three connected questions: how Ukraine has avoided macroeconomic collapse despite the loss of territory, infrastructure, and labor; how war damage is actually measured and tracked in real time; and what role international financial support has played, and will need to keep playing, in sustaining the economy through the war and into reconstruction.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko is Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review. He chairs the International Academic Board of the Kyiv School of Economics and leads the Ukraine Initiative at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), which has published more than fifty evidence-based analyses on the economic consequences of the war.
