Congratulations to the Economics PhD Class of 2024!

Pedro is an economist with a policy-driven research agenda in Labor Economics and Macroeconomics. His current research seeks to enhance understanding of how labor market frictions and credit supply shocks affect informal employment prevalence, wage disparities, and firms' performance. His job market paper (Job Ladder Consequences of Employment Protection: Theory and Evidence from Peru) examines how employment protection shapes the incentives for both workers and firms to demand and supply informal employment and different types of formal labor. In addition to his policy-driven research agenda, he is passionate about teaching and mentoring, and was awarded a Teaching Fellowship Prize in 2021-22 for contributing to courses taught by Professors William Nordhaus and Kaivan Munshi. In the Summer of 2024, he will join Davidson College as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department.

Fernando's primary field of research is industrial organization, and much of his work has focused on higher education markets and productivity differences between public and private utilities. His job market paper, “College Quality and Tuition Subsidies in Equilibrium,” uses administrative data to gauge the quality of undergraduate programs in Brazil and studies how demand-side subsidies interact with the equilibrium level of price and quality in the Brazilian higher education sector. After graduation, Fernando will join Charles River Associates as a Senior Associate in its antitrust and competition practice.

Alvaro's research interests include economic growth and development. He focuses on the role of human capital in inducing firm growth and the aggregate implications of education policies aimed at reducing the cost of access to higher education. Alvaro’s job market paper, titled “From Classroom to Prosperity: Fostering Development Through Higher Education,” assesses the contribution to Brazilian economic growth of the reduction in access costs to higher education with a particular focus on the implications for firms' growth as a mechanism. After Yale, Alvaro will join the University of Oslo as a Full-Time Researcher for the academic year 2024-2025; later, he will join Universidad Carlos III de Madrid as an Assistant Professor.

Hanxiao’s research interests include matching and sorting in the labor market and the marriage market, particularly matching and production in teams. Her job market paper studies the complementarity of multidimensional skills in innovation and the skill composition of inventor teams, using novel data linking social security data and patent records. Her dissertation also examines how childcare policies affect marital sorting and household allocation in the long run, as well as gender disparities among investors in terms of life-cycle productivity and teamwork dynamics. She will join Capital One as a principal quantitative analyst this summer.

Mirco's research interests include macroeconomics, environmental economics, and political economy. His job market paper, titled “The Political Economy of Climate Bonds,” investigates the interplay between government debt and climate change policy in a setting where voters from different generations have different interests. The paper finds conditions under which debt instruments can help stimulate climate change policy as well as circumstances in which debt is a hindrance to climate policy. In the 2024-2025 academic year, Mirco will be joining the economics department at St. John Fisher University as an Assistant Professor.

Tan Gan is a microeconomic theorist with broad interests in both theoretical and applied topics. Methodologically, he is interested in principal-agent frameworks, including mechanism design, information design, and contract theory, especially with robust objectives. Topicwise, he is interested in exploring the implication of digitalization on economic behaviors. Tan's job market paper, titled “From Doubt to Devotion Trials and Learning-Based Pricing,” studies the dynamic mechanism design problem of an informed seller of experience goods. In the fall of 2024, Tan will join LSE as an Assistant Professor in the Management Department.

Daniel's research is in labor and public economics. His work explores the evolution in the last fifty years of labor supply among major demographic groups, with particular focus on the elderly and women. Daniel's job market paper, “The Changing Nature of Work, Old-Age Labor Supply, and Social Security,” evaluates the extent to which the increase in older Americans' employment rate can be attributed to changes in the nature of work and this phenomenon's implications for Social Security reforms. Daniel is joining the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Microeconomic Analysis as an Economist.

Rodrigo's research focuses on household behavior and education in low-income countries. In his job market paper, titled “Parental Death and Schooling: Gendered Spheres of Production and Parental Preferences,” he exploits variation in the timing of parental loss to estimate a structural model of household consumption and time allocation in India. He finds stark differences in the impact of parental death based on the gender of the child and the gender of the deceased parent. The strict gender division of labor in Indian households and the differences in preferences for education of mothers and fathers play a crucial role in explaining the observed effects. After graduation, Rodrigo will join Analysis Group as an Associate.

Nghiem's research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, international trade, and spatial economics. His job market paper, “Place-based Policy, Migration Barriers, and Spatial Inequality,” uses a dynamic model and data from Vietnam to analyze how place-based tax incentives and reducing migration barriers affect regional inequality. After graduation, Nghiem will join the Department of Economics at the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor in July 2024.

Sid's primary field of research is Econometrics. His job market paper develops a quasi-Bayesian approach to estimate a large class of models in which observed economic behavior depends on several latent unobservables. Sid will join University of Chicago's Booth School of Business as an Assistant Professor in Econometrics and Statistics.

Jaewon’s research interests include Industrial Organization and Applied Econometrics. His current research focuses on proper inference in the context of demand estimation. His job market paper, titled “Computationally feasible identification-robust inference on discrete choice demand,” explores how to adapt a recent econometric method that is robust to weak identification to BLP-style demand models, in a computationally feasible way. After completing his studies at Yale, Jaewon will join Compass Lexecon as a Senior Economist.

Ryungha's research interests include macroeconomics, spatial economics, and labor economics. Her research investigates why economic activities are concentrated across space and the policy implications of this concentration. Her job market paper, titled “Spatial Sorting of Workers and Firms,” develops a new theory of two-sided sorting where heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space and shows that cities can become excessively congested. Ryungha will join Northwestern and Becker Friedman Institute as a post-doctoral fellow before joining the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as an Assistant Professor.

Bernardo’s research interests include economic growth and innovation. He currently focuses on the innovation life cycle of technologies and how society allocates research efforts across technologies of different maturities. In his Job Market paper, “Embracing the Future or Building on the Past? Growth with New and Old Technologies,” Bernardo shows that only a small fraction of innovative investment goes into new, cutting-edge technologies, compared to technologies that emerged half a century ago. He then explores the determinants of this pattern and whether policymakers should try to change it. In the academic year 2024-2025, Bernardo will join Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Economics Department. In 2025, he will join the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) as an Assistant Professor of Economics.

Hiroki’s research interests include health economics and industrial organization, and his current research projects focus on the demand and supply of medical care and long-term care under capacity constraints. His job market paper “Congestion-Quality Tradeoff: Evidence from Japanese Long-Term Care Facilities” explores the tradeoff between nursing facilities' congestion and quality for producing desirable care outcomes, estimates users' preferences for these and other facility characteristics, and then discusses impacts of policies on outcomes and user welfare. After Yale, Hiroki will join the Economic and Social Research Institute of the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, as a 3-year postdoc researcher.

Jihoon’s research interests include macroeconomics, economic growth, data analysis, corporate structure, and international trade. His dissertation, titled “Business Conglomerates and Misallocation: Theory and Evidence from Chaebols” explores the role of business groups—collections of firms owned by a single family—in determining factor misallocation and aggregate productivity. After graduation, he will join Konektis Capital Management.

Anthony uses tools from industrial organization to study the economics of cities and housing supply. His dissertation research quantifies the neighborhood-level stringency of housing density restrictions in over thirty U.S. metro areas and investigates the disparate effects of these restrictions on housing affordability and spatial mobility across the income distribution. After Yale, Anthony will join Charles River Associates as a senior associate in the antitrust and competition economics practice.

Allen’s research interests lie in economic theory, particularly game theory and its applications. His current research focuses on dynamic games and communication. His job market paper, “Mediated Repeated Moral Hazard,” shows how a manager uses dynamic communication with a worker, hidden from the clients, to improve this worker’s productivity in serving the clients. Allen will join the National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor.

Siu Yuat’s research interests in development economics focus on migration, both temporary and permanent, and its intersection with child development and climate change. Siu Yuat’s job market paper, titled “Maternal and Paternal Migration and Children’s Human Capital,” explores how maternal and paternal migration will impact a child’s human capital development, which in turn will affect future parental migration decisions. After graduating, Siu Yuat will begin a postdoctoral research position at Stanford University.

Wei’s research interests include trade, growth, and the environment. His current research investigates how globalization affects growth and the environment through technology diffusion and innovation. His job market paper, titled “Clean Growth and Environmental Policies in the Global Economy,” provides a dynamic framework to evaluate environmental policies in the global economy. Wei will join the Department of Economics at University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor.

Qianyao's research interests include Labor Economics and Applied Microeconomics. Her current research focuses on human capital development, particularly the determinants of the development process. Qianyao's job market paper, titled “Child Development, Parental Investments, and Social Capital,” explores the impacts of social capital and parental investments on child skill development. After Yale, Qianyao will join Xiamen University as an Assistant Professor.