DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Northwestern’s Annie Liang has received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), its most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.

IPR economist Charles Manski and his co-author Francesca Molinari (PhD 2003) received the 2022 Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for their study “Estimating the COVID-19 Infection Rate: Anatomy of an Inference Problem” in the Journal of Econometrics.

Today, cryptocurrency seems to be everywhere. But Daniel Polotsky ’17 Econ Alumnus, right, remembers the early days of crypto — back in 2017, when “transactions” meant slapping some cash on a table in a Starbucks and waiting for a payment to your “digital wallet.” Now his company, CoinFlip, has more than 3,000 cryptocurrency ATMs around the country and was named the fastest-growing company in Chicago last year by Crain’s Chicago Business.

Six Northwestern faculty members representing three schools have been awarded a prestigious 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They were selected for their creativity, innovation and research accomplishments which make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

The Journal of Economic Perspectives attempts to fill a gap between the general interest press and most other academic economics journals. The journal aims to publish articles that will serve several goals: to synthesize and integrate lessons learned from active lines of economic research; to provide economic analysis of public policy issues; to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas among the fields of economics; to offer readers an accessible source for state-of-the-art economic thinking; to suggest directions for future research; to provide insights and readings for classroom use; and to address issues relating to the economics profession.

Featuring a letter from our Chair, Joseph Ferrie; Thank You to our donors; Undergraduate Spotlight on Wilma Tay, who participated in the Posner Research Program in Summer 2021; Faculty Updates; and an Alumni Spotlight.

Gather a group of economists together and ask what most concerns them, and a wide variety of topics would soon emerge: slowing economic growth in the rich nations, the inability of many poor nations to converge toward the rich, rising income and wealth inequality, the increasing dominance of superstar firms, growing profit margins and the decline in labor's income share, globalization and the human costs of outsourcing, deaths of despair, and the threat of climate change. Decade after decade, numerous books have been written about each of these issues. But here we have in one compact package a blockbuster book that deals with all of them.

Two fellowships were awarded to honor the late faculty member and AEA President Robert Eisner. For 2021-22, 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 2020-21 were Jose Alvarado for "Tax Evasion, Heterogeneous Rate of Returns, and Wealth Inequality" and Anran Li for "Limited Commitment, Competition, and Market Segmentation in Non-Acute Care Provision.” The prizes were generously donated by alumna Susan Schmidt Bies (PhD, 1972).