Congratulations to the Economics PhD Class of 2023!
The Department of Economics would like to give a heartfelt congratulations to the class of 2023! At this week’s commencement ceremony, the Department awarded 17 new PhDs. Below we highlight the achievements and next steps of this diverse group of graduates. Welcome to the Yale alumni community and we wish you the best in what comes next!
“The graduating class represents the best of our intellectual traditions; while in our program they immersed themselves in research that culminated in an impressive array of theses, breaking new ground in terms of both empirical discoveries and theoretical innovations. Congratulations, class of 2023!”
— Yuichi Kitamura, Director of Graduate Studies
Sheng (Charles) Cai
Charles’ research interests include trade and economic growth. His current research investigates international and spatial knowledge diffusion, with a focus on general equilibrium effects on economic growth. His job market paper, titled “Multinational Production, Technology Diffusion, and Economic Growth,” provides a dynamic framework to understand the macroeconomic impacts of multinational production. Charles will join the Department of Economics and Finance, City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in September 2023.
Haoge Chang
Haoge’s research interests include econometric theory and applied econometrics. His job market paper considers the estimation of treatment effects in randomized experiments with complex experimental designs, including cases with interference between units. Haoge will join Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department.
Zara Contractor
Zara’s research interests include macroeconomics and labor economics. Her research focuses on dimensions of wage inequality. Her job market paper, titled “The Effect of Software Adoption on Skill Demand,” investigates how firms’ software adoption choices impact their demand for skills and consequently wage inequality. Zara will join Middlebury College as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department.
Lucas Conwell
Lucas works at the intersection of development and spatial economics. His research studies questions relating to the government role in transportation and the longer-run distributional and growth effects of transportation infrastructure, with a focus on developing countries. Lucas’s job market paper, “Are There Too Many Minibuses in Cape Town? Privatized Provision of Public Transit,” combines newly-collected data on informal minibus operations and commuter preferences in Cape Town with a spatial model of the minibus sector to compare the gains from optimizing such privatized shared transit to more typical infrastructure investments. After Yale, Lucas will join University College London as a Lecturer in the Department of Economics.
Will Damron
Will's research interests include economic history and political economy. His current research focuses on technology adoption and legal institutions in the US South after the Civil War. Will’s job market paper, titled “Gains from Factory Electrification: Evidence from North Carolina, 1905-1926,” measures the effect of electricity adoption on firms and workers using newly-collected microdata. After Yale, Will will join the Cook Center at Duke University as a postdoc.
Lucas Finamor
Lucas' research interests include labor economics, public finance, and economics of education, particularly in developing countries. His current research focuses on how labor market choices depend on the institutional settings of the labor markets, exposure to several risks, and eligibility for different insurance programs. Lucas' job market paper, titled “Labor Market Informality, Risk, and Public Insurance,” explores the drivers of workers' formality and informality decisions over the life cycle, particularly how they interact with public insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and pensions. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Lucas will be a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He will then join the São Paulo School of Economics - Fundação Getulio Vargas as an Assistant Professor.
Zijian He
Zijian studies the impact of emerging technologies on the reduction of spatial barriers and its consequent effects on consumer welfare, firm strategy, and regional development. His job market paper, "Measuring Welfare Gains from Online Stores: Theory and Evidence from the Supreme Court's Wayfair Decision," employs novel data and tax policy shocks to examine the advantages of online shopping and the ensuing distributional outcomes. Zijian will join Capital One as a principal quantitative modeler this summer.
Sang Rae Kim
Sang's research interests include macro-finance and fintech. His current research investigates how moneyness of financial assets is determined and what the implications of this determination process are for the financial market and the macroeconomy. Sang's job market paper titled “Bank Opacity and Safe Asset Moneyness,” proposes a simple publicly observable metric about a bank that we can use to gauge moneyness of safe assets produced by the bank. Sang will join Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management as a Postdoctoral Scholar.
Changhyun Kwak
Changhyun's research interests include microeconomic theory and industrial organization. His current research focuses on understanding the possibilities and limitations of simple mechanisms for various problems in industrial economics. Changhyun’s job market paper, titled “Screening without Single Crossing,” explores when a general screening problem can be solved using a method typically used for single crossing problems. After completing his studies at Yale, Changhyun will join Academia Sinica as an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Economics.
Antzelos Kyriazis
Antzelos’ research interests include Monetary Economics, Fiscal Policy, and International Macroeconomics, with a focus on how the interaction of different monetary and fiscal policies affect inequality. Antzelos’ job market paper, titled “Quantitative Easing Spillovers,” explores how the quantitative easing policies of the Federal Reserve affect the macro aggregate outcomes, the asset prices, and the distribution of wealth in both the US economy and the emerging market economies. After Yale, Antzelos will join Franklin Templeton as a Research Analyst.
Masaki Miyashita
Masaki works in decision theory and other fields in microeconomics theory such as game theory and social choice. Masaki's job market paper, “Identification of Information Structures in Bayesian Games,” studies the extent to which an external observer can identify the underlying information structure by observing the distribution of equilibrium actions in a game of incomplete information. After Yale, Masaki will join The University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor.
Antonia Paredes-Haz
Antonia studies political economy and development. She focuses on the study of identity politics, which represents a threat to the ability of democracies to provide inclusive governance, particularly in low-income settings. Antonia’s job market paper, titled “Gender quotas and strategic voters: Experimental evidence from Chile’s constitutional convention”, exploits the introduction of a mandate requiring gender parity for candidates and elected representatives. Using a voter information campaign, she induces experimental variation in voter knowledge of the election rules. By using administrative data on voting outcomes, she provides causal evidence of voters' strategic behavior. After Yale, Antonia is joining the University of California, Berkeley Haas Business School as a postdoctoral fellow.
Jintaek Song
Jintaek's research interests include Public and Health Economics. He is currently focused on understanding the impact of public and health policies on various outcomes and designing more efficient policies. Jintaek's job market paper, titled “Propensity to Consume Food out of SNAP and its Welfare Implications,” estimates the propensity to consume food using the benefit dollars of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and its impact on the welfare of SNAP participants. After completing his studies at Yale, Jintaek will join the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School as a postdoctoral fellow.
Michael Sullivan
Michael's primary field of research is industrial organization, and his current research projects explore digital platform and e-commerce markets. His job market paper "Price Controls in a Multi-Sided Market" assesses caps on the commissions that food delivery platforms (e.g., DoorDash and Uber Eats) charge to restaurants, policies that many local governments in North America enacted with the intention of benefitting local restaurants. After graduating from Yale, Michael will join Harvard Business School as a post-doctoral fellow before joining the University of Western Ontario as an Assistant Professor in January 2024.
Trevor Williams
Trevor's research is in Macroeconomics and Spatial Economics. He worked on topics in innovation, migration, housing, and international trade. His job market paper, titled “Right Idea, Wrong Place? Knowledge Diffusion and Spatial Misallocation in R&D,” asked whether the federal government should offer local incentives for research and development. (The answer was yes.) After graduation, Trevor will join Cornerstone Research as an Associate.
Tianhao Wu
Tianhao studies behavioral finance and macro-finance. His research was motivated by empirical evidence in asset prices and aggregate consumption which rational theories are not able to reconcile. In his research papers, he develops trackable behavioral models to understand empirical puzzles in finance. After Yale, Tianhao will join Aquatic Capital as a quantitative researcher.
Diana Zhu
Diana studies interventions in healthcare that can improve patient outcomes and make care delivery more efficient. Her job market paper, "Comparative Advantages and Patient-Provider Matching" finds that better matching patients to healthcare providers whose strength aligns with the patient's healthcare provider can greatly reduce adverse clinical outcomes including 1-year mortality. Her other paper co-authored with Hiroki Saruya, "Complementing Public Care with Private" finds that giving patients private health care options on top of their existing public health option can reduce one-year mortality and wait times. Her third paper co-authored with Jason Abaluck et. al, "Fixing Misallocation with Guidelines," finds that promoting stricter healthcare provider adherence to guidelines could significantly prevent strokes.