Zach Flynn

Welcome to my website! I am an economist. I currently work for Udemy. I formerly worked for: Compass Lexecon, Amazon and Afiniti. I got my PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. This site has links to my academic work and my resume/CV.

My main fields of academic research are industrial organization, productivity, econometrics, and environmental economics. Recently, I have been working on some applied macroeconomics work as well, related to my more micro work on productivity choice.

I study the distribution of technology across firms and industries, how it has changed over time, and how policies affect it. Technology in economics means transformation — a method of turning some goods and services into another good or service. Some methods are better than others and we say these methods have greater productivity. I study the distribution of productivity and how to recover it from data.

In industry work, I have experience doing everything from building models for pricing Amazon Prime to implementing empirical matching algorithms to efficiently match salespeople and customers to developing analysis for experimentation. My CV has more info.

I am a fan of the San Diego Padres and their annual quest to finish better than last place in the NL West.

• In 2018, they... did not succeed.
• In 2019, they... did not succeed again... but closer!
• In 2020, they made the playoffs!
• In 2021, they did not make the playoffs - but did better!
• In 2022, they went to the NLCS!!