Nicole Kagan
Nicole Kagan is head of research and market structure at Kalshi, where her work concerns prediction-market research and the rules governing event contracts.[1] Background[edit]Bridgewater Associates[edit]Kagan was an investment associate intern at Bridgewater Associates in July and August 2020 and an investment associate from September 2022 to September 2023. She worked on the firm's macro team, focusing on short-term interest rate trading, particularly in emerging markets. Her responsibilities placed her in macroeconomic investing before she moved into graduate study and, subsequently, prediction markets.[2] In January 2023, Kagan coauthored “Europe's Stubborn Inflation Problem” with Kate Dunbar and Archie Hall. The report examined inflation that had broadened beyond energy and goods into wages and services, despite a decline in European energy prices. The authors argued that persistent underlying inflation would require further monetary restraint by the European Central Bank and create headwinds for European bond and equity markets. The paper connected labor-market conditions, household spending and monetary tightening to the firm's assessment of financial assets.[3] Kalshi[edit]Kagan joined Kalshi in 2025, worked briefly at Hebbia and returned to the exchange that September. In announcing her return, she connected her interest in event contracts to a question from her investment career: why express views through financial products affected by an event rather than trade the event itself? She said contact with a member of the exchange's team had brought her into the business and identified co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara as colleagues whose work influenced her decision to return.[4] Her responsibilities include directing a team that creates and certifies event contracts and produces research supporting the exchange's markets. In an August 2026 interview with Danny Moses, she discussed how her investment experience connects to using event contracts to express investment views. The discussion also addressed contract design and the research made available to users, placing her work at the intersection of product development and analysis of prediction-market information.[5] In December 2025, Kagan announced the launch of Kalshi Research, an academic research division she helped establish. She described its purpose as using the exchange's historical data and capacity for real-time experiments to support work by economists, political scientists, and data scientists. The initiative extended her work beyond creating contracts to studying how trading activity conveys information about future events.[6] Kagan participated in “The Science of Information Aggregation” at the Kalshi Research conference in New York on March 27, 2026. Other participants in the session included Robin Hanson of George Mason University, Thomas Rietz of Iowa Electronic Markets and Justin Dickerson of Calibration City. The session placed her research alongside work on using markets to aggregate forecasts and information.[7] In July 2026, Kagan coauthored the working paper “When do prophets profit in prediction markets?” with Anri Gu, Alec Sun, Jibang Wu and Haifeng Xu. The paper examined why superior predictive accuracy does not necessarily produce trading profits: position sizing, market prices, bid-ask spreads, and available liquidity also affect outcomes. Its theoretical framework and tests using forecasts for 2,418 Kalshi markets distinguished forecast quality from the trading strategies used to act on those forecasts.[8] Kagan and Rubens Baiocchi coauthored “Calibration in Prediction Markets: Theory and Evidence,” an August 2026 working paper examining 2,243,741 resolved Kalshi markets across 11 categories. The study assessed how closely contract prices corresponded to observed outcome frequencies and how that relationship varied with time to resolution, market category, trading volume, and participation. It reported improvements in calibration as resolution approached while acknowledging that relationships involving volume and trader counts were correlational rather than causal. It also distinguished formal market closing times from the times when underlying events actually occurred.[9] Education[edit]Kagan holds a Bachelor of Arts in economics with language citations in Russian & German. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with High Honors and a 3.94/4.0 GPA. She graduated from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a Master of Arts in Regional Studies - Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and a 4.0/4.0 GPA. Sheh holds a Master of Philosophy in economics from the University of Oxford.[10][11] References[edit]
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