Dr. Ronen Mandelkern is an expert in the field of Comparative Political Economy and Economic Policy. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the Hebrew Univeristy in Jerusalem. He served as a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Institute and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne. Since 2007, Mandelkern has been a doing research on “state responsibility and the limits of privatization” at the Center for Social Justice and Democracy in memory of Yaakov Chazan at the Van Leer Institute. He also served as a researcher and coordinator for the Committee of Inquiry into the Israeli “Welfare-to-Work” Reform at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.