Omar Olivarez

Omar Olivarez

PhD Candidate at Harvard Business School

LinkedIn

Welcome! I'm a PhD candidate at Harvard Business School, where I conduct applied microeconomic research on technology and organizations. I will complete my PhD in May 2027 and I'm on the 2026–27 job market.

As an empirical researcher, I am broadly interested in topics at the intersection of labor, organizational, and digital economics. Within this research agenda, my job market paper examines the organizational impacts of autonomous machines such as artificial intelligence and robotics. I study how the introduction of these technologies changes the composition of work, raises coordination costs, and spurs firm adaptation. My other projects investigate related questions pertaining to strategic coordination, organizational design, and technological change. To study these questions, I apply causal inference methods and machine learning to large-scale datasets.

Technology has been a central thread throughout my education, industry experience, and teaching. I earned a B.B.A. in Management Information Systems from The University of Texas at Austin and worked afterward as a Product Operations Manager at Google and an Associate Software Engineer at Southwest Airlines. At Harvard, I have also designed and taught the undergraduate course The Economics of Information and Technology, served as a Teaching Fellow for the HBS MBA course Strategy and Technology, and worked as a Course Assistant for the Harvard Kennedy School course Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics. These experiences continue to inform my research on technological change and organizations.