Profiles
Joseph Kalmenovitz
Assistant Professor of Finance at the Simon Business School
- Rochester NY UNITED STATES
- Carol Simon Hall 3-211B
- Simon School of Business
Kalmenovitz is an expert in the economics of regulation, how regulation is formed, and how regulation affects economic decisions.
Spotlight
August 26, 2025
2 min
Areas of Expertise
Biography
Professor Kalmenovitz is primarily interested in the economics of regulations. Companies view regulation as a major risk factor that profoundly affects every business decision. But there is surprisingly little research on regulation. Even basic questions, such as how to measure regulation, remain unsolved. Kalmenovitz works with large new datasets and relies on his extensive legal training to try to shed light on this fundamental topic. He is also interested in the intersection of finance and labor and in corporate governance.
Kalmenovitz is a member of the Israel Bar Association and served as a senior law clerk for the Supreme Court of Israel prior to his academic career.
Education
New York University
PhD
Finance
2020
New York University
MS
Philosophy and Finance
2019
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
BA / LL.B
Economics and Law
2012
Selected Media Appearances
What Is David Ellison’s Warner Bros. Endgame?
Variety online
2026-01-28
For more than five months, Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison has tried in vain to win a deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. Nothing has worked: The WBD board of directors has rejected Paramount’s acquisition overtures eight times and remains committed to its industry-altering $83 billion pact with Netflix.
His disrupt-and-delay strategy is engineered around the possibility that regulators in the U.S. or Europe — or President Trump — will spike the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal outright or attach onerous conditions, clearing a path for Paramount’s rival offer.
Through its tactics, Paramount is “buying time for negotiations, raising the costs for rejecting the deal and signaling commitment” to buying WBD, says Joseph Kalmenovitz, assistant professor of finance at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.
Playing by Rules Costs Wall Street Extra 51 Million Hours a Year
Bloomberg Law online
2025-08-11
Nationally, Americans spend 3.2% of total working hours complying with federal rules, according to a study on the intensity of regulations. The benefit is much harder to measure, said Joseph Kalmenovitz, a finance professor at the University of Rochester who authored the study.
In aviation, for instance, “how do you measure the benefit of a regulation that decreases the chance of a plane crash by even just one percent?” Kalmenovitz said.
Should We Pay Regulators According to Their Performance?
ProMarket online
2024-09-27
Should we pay regulators according to their performance? In a new paper, Jason Chen, Jakub Hajda, and Joseph Kalmenovitz show that a pay-for-performance system has a surprising effect: it increases regulatory effort but also motivates regulators, especially the productive ones, to quit and join the private sector.
