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Collaboration

The Department’s frequent lunches and student talks spark conversations that lead to projects. For example, “Migration and Informal Insurance”, a paper forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies, is the product of a collaboration between Yale PhD students (now alumni) and faculty. Corina Mommaerts, Costas Meghir and Mushfiq Mobarak describe how it was working together – and with their fourth coauthor, Melanie Morten PhD ‘13, who was recently given tenure at Stanford University Department of Economics.
 

Corina Mommaerts PhD ‘16, Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Wisconsin - Madison

“Costas was my advisor at the time. I remember quite vividly, he sat me down in a meeting  and said, ‘What are you interested in? What gets you excited? What do you want to work on?’ And I said, ‘I’m really interested in informal insurance.’ We started batting around ideas relating to these models of informal insurance and I started studying limited-commitment models in great detail. 

 

Costas Meghir, Douglas A. Warner III Professor of Economics

 

"Corina and I were working on a paper on informal insurance in the US, Mushfiq was running major experiments in Bangladesh on migration, and Melanie was writing a paper combining the notion of informal insurance and migration in the context of India. An experiment making migration a possibility for some people when it was not before – that seemed like a very good fit with Melanie’s model. Yale is an interactive place so we all found out about each other’s work. We got together and started talking about the data.”

 

Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics

"While we were working on this, two of our colleagues, Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig, were also working on a related paper, now published in the AER, while both Melanie and I were independently collaborating with another Yale alum, Gharad Bryan, on further papers advancing this agenda. The broader collaborative environment here is that you find people who are working along different edges of the same problem. You make connections and build an agenda. In order to study a problem rigorously you do need to take a small piece of it, but across all of us, different papers are coming together to jointly help us understand the bigger picture on the various causes and consequences of migration."