Since August 2026, Anastasiia Arbuzova has been serving as Assistant Professor for Political Economy of Governance in Non-Democratic Regimes at the Kiel Institute and Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), Stockholm School of Economics. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics at Boston University and her undergraduate degree at the New Economic School and Higher School of Economics. Her research spans fields of political economy and development economics, with a particular interest in autocracies, gender, and media. In 2026, her job market paper, "Fraud and Legitimacy: The Economics of Autocratic Elections," received the PEDD Young Scholar Award.