Dhammika Dharmapala joined Berkeley Law in 2023 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law. He serves as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, and is an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, a fellow of the CESifo Research Network, and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. He is also Vice-President of the American Law and Economics Association, a past Co-President of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He has previously served on the Boards of the National Tax Association and the International Institute of Public Finance. He has held postdoctoral or visiting positions at various institutions, including Harvard, Michigan, Georgetown, Oxford, the Australian National University, and the International Monetary Fund.
Dharmapala received a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley; his thesis was awarded the National Tax Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. His scholarship spans the fields of taxation and public finance, the economic analysis of law, and corporate finance and governance. This research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals in law, economics, and finance, as well as in law reviews (such as the University of Chicago Law Review). His paper on “Estimating Firms’ Responses to Securities Regulation Using a Bunching Approach” was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Article Prize of the American Law and Economics Association. His work has also been cited in various media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, and The Economist. His papers are available at SSRN and Google Scholar.
Education
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
M.Ec., University of Western Australia
B.Ec., University of Western Australia
Dhammika Dharmapala is teaching the following courses in Spring 2026:
• 217.12 sec. 001 - Law and Economics Foundation Seminar
• 217.14 sec. 001 - Law, Economics, and Social Sciences Colloquium
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Spring 2025 | 217.12 sec. 001 | Law and Economics Foundation Seminar | 217.14 sec. 001 | Law, Economics, and Social Sciences |
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