As director of Corporate Power at the Roosevelt Institute, Niko Lusiani leads the think tank‘s program to dissect and dismantle the ways in which extractive corporate behavior jeopardizes workers, consumers, our natural environment, and our shared economic system. Niko develops cutting-edge research exploring the mechanisms by and extent to which firms, executives, and shareholders have gained, retained, and wield outsized power in our economy and politics, while also teeing up policies to promote shared prosperity and reclaim power for workers and the public by curbing corporate power.
Niko brings to Roosevelt over 15 years of research and advocacy lifting up alternative economic policies which uphold people’s human rights in the US and around the world. At Oxfam, he played a key role in defining the agency’s economic inequality research agenda – especially knitting together different strands on corporate tax, corporate governance as well as racial, gender and economic inequalities. He also led the organization’s engagement in and around the pharmaceutical sector before and during COVID-19. Before Oxfam, Niko directed the economic policy program at the Center for Economic and Social Rights— managing cross-jurisdictional investigative projects on various economic policy areas, especially on the use of economic rights as a framework for public financing alternatives to fiscal consolidation and austerity.
A frequent contributor to debates on tax, corporate governance and economic inequality, Niko’s work has been widely featured in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, VICE and the LA Times. Niko’s most recent publication exposed how the shareholder-first business model typifying today’s US corporations left our economy exposed to a thoroughly unequal winner-takes-all pandemic.
Niko was raised in Northern California by his amazing bilingual public school teacher mother. He speaks Spanish and French fluently, and holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.