Allison Schrager

Allison Schrager is an American economist, journalist and risk professional, and a senior fellow of finance at Cardiff Business School. Her book An Economist Walks into a Brothel uses unexpected places — from strip clubs to extreme sports to modern finance — to explain how managing risk, not avoiding it, is the key to modern life.

With a PhD in economics from Columbia, Schrager has worked in the pensions and derivatives desks of investment banks and in her journalism writes about the economics of risk in business and society. Her central, counter-intuitive teaching is that freedom comes not from safety but from taking risks deliberately.