NEWS SPOTLIGHT

Professor of Economics Steven Helfand received the honor of becoming a Fellow of the Brazilian Society of Agricultural Economics  (SOBER). SOBER calls its Fellows “legendary members” in Portuguese. His new title represents society’s highest honor. Professor Helfand has been a member of SOBER since 1999. He traveled to Brazil in August 2022 to attend the ceremony to accept the award. [Read More]

We would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 job candidates!  They are all moving on to exciting positions across the globe in academia or in the private sector.  Justin Dang, Tao Wang, and Quanfeng Zhou are taking Assistant Professor positions at the University of San Diego, University of Victoria (Canada), and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, respectively. Yanchao Yang will be going to DePaul University as a Clinical Instructor.  Meanwhile, Saman Banafti, Taghi Farzad, and Zhaozhen Zhao will be taking dynamic Economist positions at Amazon, Fannie Mae, and Digonex, respectively.  We wish them all success in this next phase.

Deepshikha Batheja’s (Ph.D. 2020) study “Gender Peer Effects in Indian Call Centers”, received the Best Paper Award at the Indian Statistical Institute’s 3^rd Annual Women in the Economy Workshop, and has been featured in the World Bank Development Impact Blog, Ideas for India, the International Growth Centre (IGC) blog, and the national daily Hindustan Times. Batheja conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) to study if the gender of co-workers mattered for call center employees in five Indian cities. For both male and female employees in mixed-gender teams, there was no negative effect on productivity. This, and other observations relating to mutual learning and knowledge spillovers, provide supportive evidence for integrating women into the workplace without additional costs to the firm.

Ruoyao Shi awarded Hellman Fellowship

Assistant Professor Ruoyao Shi was awarded a Hellman Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year to study homeownership assistance programs. Professor Shi will work on developing and calibrating a dynamic choice model that features the constraints that households face when they make housing decisions. With the model calibrated by the data on households’ actual housing decisions, Professor Shi hopes to quantify the significance of various barriers between disadvantaged households and homeownership, and more importantly, to evaluate the efficacy and the cost effectiveness of popular homeownership assistance programs targeting disadvantaged households.

Assistant Professor Carolyn Sloane had her NBER research paper on pre-market human capital specialization and the college gender wage gap covered in the Wall Street Journal and CNBC:

• WSJ:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-slowly-shifting-to-higher-paying-college-majors-study-says-11570179600
• CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/women-are-pursuing-more-high-paying-degrees-but-the-pay-gap-remains.html
• The Becker Friedman Institute: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/a-cross-cohort-analysis-of-human-capital-specialization-and-the-college-gender-wage-gap/

Professor Emeritus Prasanta Pattanaik has been honored with one of India’s highest civilian Awards – the Padma Shri award (https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=197647). This award honors individuals who have distinguished themselves in various disciplines such as social work, public affairs, academic research, science, arts, civil service, among others, and who have made a profound contribution to social progress and to society.  The award will be conferred by the President of India at the ceremonial functions which are held at Rashtrapati Bhawan around March/April 2020.