The Department of Economics Welcomes New Faculty for Fall 2022
The Economics Department welcomed four new professors to its faculty this fall.
Spanning a diverse set of backgrounds and interests, these new members will bring fresh ideas and create exciting new research opportunities within the Department, its three research centers, and the larger Yale economics community. We are delighted to welcome them to our faculty!
The new faculty members include Professor of Economics and Global Affairs Amit Khandelwal, Professor of Economics and Global Affairs Christopher Neilson, Assistant Professor of Economics and Global Affairs Lauren Bergquist, and Cowles Foundation Postdoctoral Associate Max Cytrynbaum, who will join Yale as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023.
Lauren Bergquist
Lauren Falcao Bergquist joins us from University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor of Global Affairs. Her current research interests focus on market efficiency, trade, and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Lauren is involved in several projects through J-PAL/CEGA’s joint Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative. Among these are a pilot investigating the barriers to high product quality along a value chain within Ethiopia’s honey sector and a study on the timing of loans to maize farmers to promote grain storage. She earned her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Amit Khandelwal
Amit Khandelwal returns to Yale where he originally earned his Ph.D. in economics as a Professor of Economics and Global Affairs and senior faculty member at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, he was the Jerome Chazen Professor of Global Business and Chair of the Economics Division at Columbia Business School. He holds affiliations at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Council on Foreign Relations, and JPAL. His research focuses on the link between international trade and economic development. He has studied how trade reforms in China and India affected participation in global markets and firms’ productivity. He has also implemented randomized trials that explore the causal impacts of trade, FDI, and technology adoption in Egypt, Myanmar, and Pakistan. His most recent work has examined the U.S. trade war and its implications for the U.S. economy.
Christopher Neilson
Christopher Neilson joins the Department of Economics as a Professor of Economics and Global Affairs this fall. Professor Neilson is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the study of education markets and policies that promote equitable opportunities for human capital accumulation. Neilson studies how government policy affects students, families, and education providers, drawing on methods from industrial organization, labor economics, and development economics. He works closely with governments, particularly in Latin America, to help them leverage their data, existing evidence, and technology to design, evaluate, and implement new education policies. In 2018, Neilson founded ConsiliumBots, an NGO that serves as an incubator for ideas in education. To date, ConsiliumBots has developed tools that have helped over 2 million families in 7 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Max Cytrynbaum
Max Cytrynbaum is a Cowles Foundation Postdoctoral Associate and will join Yale as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. His research interests lie broadly in econometric theory, with a particular interest in causal inference and experimental design. His recent work shows how to design more efficient experiments using multi-stage designs and generalized fine stratification methods.