Inaugural Senior Essay Conference Highlights Cutting Edge Student Research

Each year, around 30-50 seniors write essays in economics, which give students an opportunity to engage in independent economic research. These essays contain original research and/or analysis aimed at examining a hypothesis using the tools of economics, and are supervised by Department faculty. 

For the first time, students presented their essays at the inaugural Yale Economics Senior Essay Conference, attended by over 150 students, faculty advisors, family, and friends. The event featured a full day of student presentations across eight sessions, followed by a celebratory dinner.

The program included 16 Senior Essay presenters, with two sessions running in parallel throughout the afternoon. Ranging from international trade policy to monetary policy in emerging markets, energy storage demand, and beyond—many essays addressed timely global challenges. A unifying theme was the students’ strong engagement with real-world, policy-relevant questions using a variety of analytical tools.

From the impact of the 2018 U.S.–China trade tensions on Thailand’s economy, to the role of interest rate shocks in Brazil, the essays reflected not only academic rigor but also a strong awareness of pressing economic and political issues in the contemporary world.

Many of these essay were nominated for and awarded prizes at 2025 Commencement: Celebrating the 2025 Undergraduate Senior Prize Winners and Nominees

The program featured the following essays:

• Will Aarons: Electoral Incentives, Partisan Identity, and Local Police Responses to the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests in U.S. Cities
• Maya Aidlin-Perlman: Empowering Women in the Age of AI: Selection into Digital Technology Training Programs in Latin America
• Lila Alloula: Shrinkflation in the Snack Aisle: Evidence from Doritos’ 2021 Downsizing
• Zachary Donnini: Are Women Penalized at the Ballot Box? Analyzing Electability and Gender in U.S. House Races
• Mitchell Dubin: Market Power in the US Automobile Industry
• Logan George: A Risky Weighting Game: Examining the Impact of the Community Bank Leverage Ratio Framework on Financial System Risk
• Colin Means: The Impact of COVID-19 Policy on Natural Cause Mortality
• Alexandra Paulus: Modeling Demand in the Electric Vehicle Lithium-Ion Battery Market
• Gian Luca Reti: Mobile Payments Adoption in Brazil: The Effect of Shocks to the Brick-and-Mortar Banking Network on Pix Usage
• Nicolás Salinas-Reyes: Decomposing Labor Income Inequality in Mexico: Education, Gender, and Informality
• Eming Shyu: Interest-Rate Related Run Risks of Mid- to Large-sized Banks in the United States
• Paris Suksmith: A Story of Semiconductors and Silk: Heterogeneity in Export Elasticities to the 2018 U.S.-China Trade War Tariffs and Implications for Thailand
• Gabriel Thomaz Vieira: Assessing Monetary Policy Surprises in Brazil: A High-Frequency SVAR Approach
• Thomas Triedman: Private Equity and Volatility Smoothing
• Eli Tsung: Wages and Multidimensional Skill Mismatch: Evidence from LinkedIn
• Alex Ye: The Language of Central Banking: Measuring Complexity and Market Impact

The conference was organized by Senior Lecturer and Director of Research Support Rebecca Toseland, and Yale Economics PhD Student Carles Aules Blancher.

Learn more about the Senior Essay here.