Elham Saeidinezhad, Ph.D.

Elham Saeidinezhad is a Doctoral Lecturer in Finance at the Colin Powell School of Business at City College of New York. She also teaches graduate courses on capital markets at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and in the Economics Department at New York University Stern School of Business. Her research focuses on market microstructure, liquidity design, and the role of financial infrastructure and contractual structures in shaping modern capital markets.

She is the founder of the Market Microstructure Project and co-founder of CovenantLab, a research and analytics initiative developing valuation frameworks for bespoke financial contracts, particularly in private credit. CovenantLab’s core thesis is that markets no longer need to choose between contractual flexibility and comparability. Its framework aims to preserve contractual creativity while enabling consistent pricing and analysis of complex covenant packages across private markets.

Before joining CCNY, she taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to academia, she worked as a research economist at the Milken Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Empirical Macroeconomics from University of Sheffield and is originally from Shiraz, Iran.