The Department of Economics Welcomes New Faculty for Fall 2024

Timothy Christensen joins the Department as a Professor of Economics. Before joining Yale, he was a Professor of Economics at University College London. He received a PhD in Economics from Yale in 2014. His research interests lie broadly across theoretical and applied econometrics, financial econometrics, and statistics/data science. His most recent research is at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning, where he works on the integration of unstructured data into quantitative economic modeling. He has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

Mayara Felix joins the Department as an Assistant Professor, after completing the 2023-2024 year as a Cowles Foundation Postdoctoral Associate. Her research is in the fields of development and international trade. She studies policies intended to improve market efficiency, such as import tariff reductions, free trade agreements, and outsourcing. A special focus of her research is firms’ responses to these policies and their implications to competition, either in labor or product markets. She thus often borrows methods and insights from the fields of labor, public, and industrial organization. Mayara received a PhD in Economics from MIT in June 2021.

Joel Flynn joins the Department as an Assistant Professor, after completing the 2023-24 year as a Cowles Foundation Postdoctoral Associate. His research is in macroeconomics and economic theory with an emphasis on business cycles and mechanism design. He has recently studied how economic uncertainty affects the transmission of monetary policy and how viral economic narratives cause macroeconomic boom-bust cycles. His mechanism design research has focused on the optimal design of two-sided matching markets and optimal contracting when contracts are incomplete. Joel graduated from MIT with a PhD in Economics in June 2023.

Elliot Lipnowski joins the Department as an Associate Professor, studying microeconomic theory. His interests include information design, mechanism design, dynamic games, organizational economics, and strategic uncertainty. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo and his PhD at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Before joining Yale, he was a faculty member at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University. He currently serves as an associate editor at Theoretical Economics and at Econometrica.

Pascual Restrepo joins the Department as an Associate Professor. Prior to Yale, Restrepo was a Professor at Boston University. He completed a PhD in Economics at MIT and a Postdoc at the Cowles Foundation at Yale. His research explores the implications of technological change for inequality and productivity. His most recent work studies the development and adoption of new automation technologies and how they have affected the economy, firms, and labor markets.

Cody Cook joins the Department as a Cowles Postdoctoral Associate before joining as an Assistant Professor in July 2025. He is an economist who works at the intersection of public, urban, and labor economics, often focusing on the design and evaluation of policies affecting inequality in cities. His research combines large-scale datasets with tools adapted from industrial organization. Some of his recent work has studied the tradeoffs of building affordable housing in different types of neighborhoods, the distributional effects of congestion pricing, and how preferences for neighborhood amenities vary by household income. He holds a PhD from Stanford GSB.