Jonathan Welburn is a senior researcher at RAND and a professor of policy analysis 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
Jonathan W. Welburn, Pedro Nascimento de Lima, Krishna B. Kumar, Osonde A. Osoba, Jonathan Lamb, Overcoming Compound Racial Inequity: Policies and Costs for Closing the Black-White Wealth Gap, RAND Corporation (RR A1259-2), 2022
Jonathan William Welburn and Aaron Strong, "Systemic Cyber Risk and Aggregate Impacts,", 42, 2022
Jonathan W. Welburn, Justin Grana, Karen Schwindt, "Cyber Deterrence with Imperfect Attribution and Unverifiable Signaling," European Journal of Operational Research, 306(3), 2023
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