DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

The Metzger family’s efforts to cut down on household waste became a multicity recycling operation.

From selling six of his own companies to serving as president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, Jon McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and reveals the secrets to his success

Daydream rakes in $50M seed funding to build an AI-powered search engine suited for e-commerce

The Economics Department is saddened to share that Dr. Marc Nerlove has recently passed away at the age of 90. Dr. Nerlove was professor of Economics at Northwestern from 1974 through 1982. His many accolades include the John Bates Clark Award in 1969, Fellow of the Econometric Society, Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, and Past President of the Econometric Society. His memorial page is linked from the University of Maryland Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, where he was most recently an emeritus faculty member.

Check out our latest newsletter for updates from the department and a reflection on the 2023-24 academic year.

This year’s report, compiled by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), was co-written by IPR economist Kirabo Jackson. He was appointed by President Joe Biden as a senior member of the CEA last August. The CEA sits within the Executive Office and delivers research-driven recommendations on matters of national and international economic policy to the president.

Manny Buendia (‘23) reflects on his time at Northwestern, including the impact of his courses in the Economics Department with Professors Sarah Hernandez and Mark Witte.

"Tevlin is the most important person in U.S. economics that you have probably never heard of."

Laura Doval receives the inaugural Arrow Prize (with co-author Vasiliki Skreta) for the best theory paper published in Econometrica in the preceding four years and the 2024 TE Best Paper Prize for the best paper published in TE in the preceding two years.

Voices in Development: A Podcast from Yale's Economic Growth Center explores issues related to sustainable development and economic justice in low- and middle-income countries. With Francis Annan of UC Berkeley, Rausser College of Natural Resources and Rohini Pande of Yale Department of Economic

First deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Gopinath is leading research on AI’s impact on labor and markets

Automatic or remote-control shutoff valves have been required on newly constructed pipelines located in or near populated and environmentally sensitive areas since 2022. They are intended to enable faster shutdowns of ruptured pipe segments. However, the requirement for “rupture mitigation valves” does not apply to pipelines installed prior to 2022. The report examines the regulatory requirements that apply and issues a series of recommendations for making sounder decisions about when and where to retroactively install these valves.

“Our study shows that since 1870, it has never been the case that immigrants as a group have been more incarcerated than the U.S.-born,” Jácome said.

Pei receives a five-year grant to use game theory to understand the circumstances under which economic agents (such as firms and politicians) have incentives to take socially desirable actions in long-term relationships.

Do non-traditional digital trace data and traditional survey data yield similar estimates of the impact of a cash transfer program? In a randomized controlled trial of Togo’s COVID-19 Novissi program, endline survey data indicate positive treatment effects on beneficiary food security, mental health, and self-perceived economic status. However, impact estimates based on mobile phone data – processed with machine learning to predict beneficiary welfare – do not yield similar results, even though related data and methods do accurately predict wealth and consumption in prior cross-sectional analysis in Togo. This limitation likely arises from the underlying difficulty of using mobile phone data to predict short-term changes in well-being within a rural population with fairly homogeneous baseline levels of poverty. The researchers discuss the implications of these results for using new digit

The researchers present an econometric structure for the analysis of intergenerational mobility that integrates non-linearities, the role of maternal-side effects and the impact of grandparents. They show how previously estimated models are special cases of this general framework and what specific assumptions each embeds. Their analysis of linked U. S. data 1900–40 reveals the extent to which inadequate consideration of assortative mating and the impact of mothers produces misleading conclusions.

How does immigration enforcement affect public safety? Heightened enforcement could reduce crime by deterring and incapacitating immigrant offenders or, alternatively, increase crime by discouraging victims from reporting offenses. We study the U.S. Secure Communities program, which expanded interior enforcement against unauthorized immigrants. Using national survey data, we find that the program reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims reported crimes to police and increased the victimization of Hispanics. Total reported crimes are unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We provide evidence that reduced Hispanic reporting is the key driver of increased victimization. Our findings underscore the importance of trust in institutions as a central determinant of public safety.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Dale Mortensen's research delved into questions such as the impact of unemployment benefits on job searches and the reasons behind wage discrepancies among similarly skilled workers.

In an effort to prevent corruption, many states have adopted revolving door laws, which require a “cooling off period” mandating a break for politicians before becoming lobbyists. But there may be unintended consequences to these laws.

IPR economist Elisa Jacome studies public policy issues centered on immigration, crime, and mental health

Investors include Kevin Durant, Jayson Tatum, and Billie Jean King. It's the latest sign of growing momentum and interest in women's professional sports, particularly volleyball. Two months ago, more than 92,000 people watched the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team play at the school's football stadium — setting a world record for attendance at a women's sporting event.

hostU is a Chicago, IL-based medium-term rental platform curated for university students and faculty.

The Roundtable will improve the understanding of how the physical and transition effects of climate change relate to and affect macroeconomic performance and the implications for fiscal, monetary, and financial stability policies.

Before Plenful, Liu was a health system specialty pharmacy operator with the-now-Walgreens-owned Shields Health Solutions, where she says that she experienced firsthand how manual and time-consuming many of the pharmacy workflows were — and how they bogged down her team.

The price of renewables has fallen much faster than other sources of energy, making it a more accessible option for governments in low- and middle-income countries. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Mar Reguant and John Van Reenen discuss how renewable power provides a unique opportunity to decarbonise electricity generation, and how policy can speed up the green transition.

Deborah Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests lie broadly in econometrics, and she is currently working on testing for sign agreements.

The Miller Upton Forum seeks to deepen students’ understanding of the wealth and well-being of nations through intimate interactions with preeminent thinkers. The Miller Upton Scholar is a public intellectual whose distinguished work and influential ideas become the driving force of the annual forum.

Deborah Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests lie broadly in econometrics, and she is currently working on testing for sign agreements.

The Department of Economics is saddened to share the news that Edith “Edie” Eisner has recently passed away. Eisner, the wife of longtime Economics faculty member Robert Eisner, was a teacher at the Roycemore School in Evanston, IL where she was later named a Life Trustee and Honorary Alumna. In 2020, a scholarship in the name of her late husband, Robert Eisner, was established at Roycemore. Edie and Robert met when she was a student at Duke University and he was attending basic training in the US Army. They were married in 1946, following Robert’s discharge from the military after his service in WWII. A constant supporter of education at both Roycemore and Northwestern, Mrs. Eisner impacted many in her almost 100 years of life. The Department of Economics sends our condolences to Edie’s family and loved ones during this difficult time.

USAID relies heavily on a small number of well-connected contractors to deliver most aid, while other groups are often deterred from even applying by the process’s complexity. Use of rigorous evaluation methods like randomized controlled trials — where development programs are tested on a random subset of the target population to see if they work — are the exception, not the norm. One of the agency’s current leaders tasked with changing this status quo is its chief economist, Dean Karlan. His appointment was perceived as a major victory for people in and around USAID who want its programs to rely more on rigorous evidence.

The constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) aggregator and its demand system are ubiquitous in business cycles theory, macroeconomic growth and development, international trade and other general equilibrium fields; this is because the CES aggregator has many knife-edge properties that help to keep the analysis tractable in the presence of many goods and factors. However, this also makes it hard to tell which properties of CES are responsible for certain results. Furthermore, it is necessary to relax some of those properties for certain applications. In this article, I review several classes of non-CES aggregators, each of which removes some properties of CES and keeps the rest to introduce some flexibility while retaining the tractability of CES as much as possible. These classes are named after the properties of CES they keep. I explain how these classes are related to each other and

J. Landis “Lanny” Martin ’68, ’73 J.D. (’02, ’07, ’08 P), Northwestern alumnus, life trustee, former chair of the Board of Trustees and one of the University’s most generous benefactors, died today, Sept. 1. He was 77 years old.