Faculty Updates
Our faculty have been busy this year advancing the bounds of economic scholarship, engaging the world and setting high standards for our students. Visit the homepage for more publications and news and see what podcasts faculty recommend!
Ivan Canay has been appointed as one of the two co-Editors of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics this year. He holds a NSF TRIPODS award to support The Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), a multi-discipline and multi-institution collaborative institute that focuses on key aspects of the theoretical foundations of data science. Two main areas of his current research include the study of outcome tests to detect bias in decision making and identification and inference in models with clustered data, including experiments with cluster level assignment. His most recent journal publication includes “The Wild Bootstrap with a Small Number of Large Clusters” (joint with Azeem Shaikh and Andres Santos), in The Review of Economics and Statistics.
My research this year has focused on the implications of the Covid--19 pandemic on families. One set of projects examines the impact of the pandemic on the labor market, and in particular how shutdowns and school closures had a large impact on women's ability to work during the crisis. Another project examines the impact of school closures on children's education and educational inequality. Recent publications include, "From Mancession to Shecession: Women's Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions" (with Titan Alon, Sena Coskun, David Koll, and Michèle Tertilt), forthcoming, NBER Macro Annual. This paper documents the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on women's employment in a set of countries. It shows that childcare needs had a large impact on women's ability to work, but also that the ability to work from home protected many parents from losing employment.
Joel Mokyr was named a 2021 Citation Laureate™ for his studies of the history and culture of technological progress and its economic consequences. He is one of 16 researchers from around the globe whose work is deemed to be ‘of Nobel class,’ according to analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™. He is working on two new books, one deals with the historical origins of the Great Economic Bifurcation between East and West, the other on the roots of British leadership in the Industrial Revolution. His most recent publications include, "The Holy Land of Industrialism" — Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Journal of the British Academy, Vol. 9, 2021). He also has a forthcoming paper, “The Wheels of Change: Technology Adoption, Millwrights, and the Persistence in Britain's Industrialization” to be published jointly with Assaf Sarid and Karine van der Beek in The Economics Journal. He contributed to The Handbook of Historical Economics, writing chapter 25: Attitudes, Aptitudes, and the Roots of the Great Enrichment, published by Elsevier Press.
Rob Porter is serving as the President of the Industrial Organization Society. He is one of the founding Editors of Microeconomic Insights, a website that provides accessible summaries of high-quality microeconomic research. He served as a Co-Editor of American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and received a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. He was scheduled to give the Barcelona GSE Lecture in May, but the event was cancelled due to the Covid crisis.
Giorgio Primiceri’s most recent publications include "Economic Predictions with Big Data: The Illusion of Sparsity, published jointly with Domenico Giannone and Michele Lenza (Econometrica, Vol. 88, Issue 5, September 2021) and has a forthcoming paper in The Journal of Political Economy, “The Mortgage Rate Conundrum” (jointly with Alejandro Justiniano and Andrea Tambalotti).
Ian Savage is the 2022 President of the Transportation and Public Utilities Group, one of the member associations of the ASSA. Ian Savage is chairing a National Research Council committee that has been charged by Congress to investigate whether oil and gas pipelines should be retrofitted with remote-controlled or automatic valves that can be activated to mitigate the consequences of any leaks. Ian Savage published an article with Max Hyman (WCAS, '21) based on his senior honors paper. The paper, "The Value of Space During a Pandemic" in Economics Letters, volume 207, analyzed whether Delta Air Lines was able to raise its fares in the second half of 2020 when unlike its principal rivals, American Airlines and United Airlines, it did not sell the middle seat to promote social distancing. It was found that passengers paid a 15% price premium, about $23 dollars on a one-way trip, to prevent a stranger from sitting next to them.
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