DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Shortly after beginning her career as a management consultant, Rachel Xanttopoulos realized that the job wasn’t a great fit for her long-term. After mentioning to a colleague she’d love to work for the New York Times, she landed in the NYT strategy group and rose up the ranks for a few years before deciding to return to school to earn her MBA at Kellogg, with the intention of starting her own business.

We hope you enjoy reading the Winter 2021 edition of our Newsletter. This edition includes an update from our Chair, a thank you to our wonderful donors, faculty podcast recommendations, alumni spotlights and more!

Interview with Colton Horn and Dr. Gerald Horn, the Co-Founders of Breinfuel, a Chicago Founder Institute portfolio company that has developed a scientifically-derived performance beverage formula from coffees, teas, collagen, and antioxidants: https://www.breinfuel.com/. Watch to learn the metabolic science behind how Breinfuel's unique formulation works to reduce oxidative stress while recharging the brain.

We study the causal impact of religiosity through a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program delivered to thousands of ultrapoor Filipino households. Six months after the program ended, treated households have higher religiosity and income; no statistically significant differences in total labor supply, consumption, food security, or life satisfaction; and lower perceived relative economic status. Exploratory analysis suggests that the income treatment effect may operate through increasing grit. Thirty months after the program ended, significant differences in the intensity of religiosity disappear, but those in the treatment group are less likely to be Catholic and more likely to be Protestant, and there is some mixed evidence that their consumption and perceived relative economic status are higher.

For many who crossed the digital divide this year, there will be no going back. The Covid-19 pandemic forced Americans to collectively swap the physical for the digital world in a matter of months. As retailers learn to operate without stores, business travelers without airplanes, and workers without offices, much of what started out as a temporary expedient is likely to become permanent.

With a dangerous winter ahead, containing the pandemic is crucial. One innovation worth trying in the months before vaccinations are widespread is to pay college students to be careful and remain free of the coronavirus.

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Consolidator Grant to Mar Reguant (Northwestern University). The five-year project is called “Understanding the Energy Transition with a Machine Learning Toolbox,” and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics will be the host institution.

Two fellowships were awarded to honor the late faculty member and AEA President Robert Eisner. For 2020-21, the Fellowships were awarded to Joao Guerreiro and Udayan Vaidya. The fellowship or fellowships are awarded annually to fourth-year students who have distinguished themselves in both teaching and research.

The Susan Bies awards are given to the best public policy papers presented as part of the Economics 501 seminar. The winners for 2019-20 were Eilidh Geddes for "Insurer Competition and Rating Areas on the ACA Exchanges" and Nicole Ozminkowski for "Rent Control and Domestic Violence" (joint with Eilidh Geddes). The prizes were generously donated by alumna Susan Schmidt Bies (PhD, 1972).

central question in economics is how people respond to risk – specifically, how they respond to low-probability events. This column uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to answer this question. Studying the consumption behaviour of Portuguese public sector workers, whose income was likely unaffected by the crisis, they find that older workers reduced their consumption of high-contact goods by much more than younger workers. As the likelihood for dying from COVID-19 is increasing in age, these results suggest that workers’ responses are commensurate with the risk they face.