Jonathan Welburn, Ph.D., is a researcher at the RAND Corporation, and faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His work leverages methods from operations research, computational economics, decision and risk analysis to elucidate emerging systemic risks and the potential for market failures. Along these themes, Welburn’s research has covered topics ranging from systemic risks in the macroeconomy, the economic consequences of large cyber risks, and opportunities for enhanced cyber deterrence.
Currently, Welburn is leading several projects including methods for identifying and prioritizing systemically important entities across sectors of the U.S. economy, the estimation of global interfirm (supply chain) networks, and models of economic disparity.
Welburn’s work has been sponsored by several federal agencies including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Defense, the Air Force, and the Army and has been published in RAND Reports, academic journals, and national news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and the LA Times. In addition to his research at RAND, Welburn is a member of the Aspen Cyber Group, the Society for Risk Analysis council, the Decision Analysis Society council, and a collaborator with the World Economic Forum on Technology, Innovation and Systemic Risk.
Selected Publications
Welburn, Jonathan W., Aaron Strong, Florentine Eloundou Nekoul, Justin Grana, Krystyna Marcinek, Osonde A. Osoba, Nirabh Koirala, and Claude Messan Setodji, Systemic Risk in the Broad Economy: Interfirm Networks and Shocks in the U.S. Economy, RAND Corporation (RR-4185-RC), 2020
Jonathan William Welburn and Aaron Strong, Systemic Cyber Risk and Aggregate Impacts, Risk Analysis (WR-) (forthcoming)
Vardavas, Raffaele, Aaron Strong, Jennifer Bouey, Jonathan William Welburn, Pedro Nascimento de Lima, Lawrence Baker, Keren Zhu, Michelle Priest, Lynn Hu, and Jeanne S. Ringel,, The Health and Economic Impacts of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions to Address COVID-19: A Decision Support Tool for State and Local Policymakers, RAND Corporation, 2020. (TL-173-1), 222
Welburn, Jonathan W., "Crises Beyond Belief: Findings on contagion, the role of beliefs, and the Eurozone debt crisis from a borrower lender game," Computational Economics, 2018