The Department of Economics congratulates the 2021-22 recipients of the Arvid Anderson Prize Fellowship in Economics. The five graduate students are: Haoge Chang (Econometrics), Zara Contractor (Labor Economics and Macroeconomics), Lucas Finamor (Labor Economics and Public Finance), Tan Gan (Micro Theory), and Ryungha Oh (Macroeconomics, International Trade).
The fellowship prize is awarded annually in partnership with the Cowles Foundation to one or more pre-doctoral or post-doctoral students who are selected by a committee of professors in the Department of Economics with the approval of the Dean of the Graduate School. The cash prize also includes time off from academic duties for one semester, giving students time to concentrate on their research.
When asked what the fellows will do during their semester off, Finamor said he will continue to work on his research projects that are on “Informality and Social Insurance Programs” and “College Graduation and Labor Market Conditions.” Contractor said she will be working on two projects. The first project shows how software adoption impacts firms’ demand for different types of skills, and the second project looks at affirmative action in the workplace.
Tan Gan said he is currently working on several projects, but at the top of the list is “Estimation, Data Generators, and the Optimal Contract,” which he is collaborating with Yale Economics Professors Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti. The brief description of the project on his website states, “The data externality dramatically reduces consumers’ evaluation of their data (either positive or negative), potentially causing distortion in both directions. When the number of consumers is large, the firm can capture the entire value of information by anonymization.”
As for Oh, she said, “I will mainly work on my prospectus which is about the spatial sorting of workers and firms under frictional labor markets. I am also planning to work on another project on agglomeration on services.” And Chang said he will work on problems related to treatment effects.
With the fellowship’s purpose to foster the advancement of economic research, the award was established in 1982 by the award’s namesake, Carl Arvid Anderson. Mr. Anderson created the award out of inspiration from a scholarship he received as an Yale undergraduate, to which he attributes in helping him earn a B.A. in Economics in 1936.
In Anderson’s own words, the fund is intended to “promote the development of more effective methods of inquiry in economics and the dissemination of information resulting from such studies.” Since its foundation, over 135 recipients have been awarded the fellowship.
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