Letter from the Chair
Alumni and Friends of the Department of Economics,
Northwestern has now completed its academic year, culminating with our June graduation ceremonies. The campus is quiet, with students and faculty scattered around the world. I’m writing to update you on developments of the past six months in the Department of Economics.
The department had a busy recruiting year, as we often do. Garima Sharma (Ph.D. MIT) spent last year at Princeton as a post-doc and will join us this summer as an Assistant Professor. Kunal Sangani (Ph.D. Harvard) will spend next year as a post-doc at Stanford before joining us in the summer of 2025. Garima is a development economist who studies labor markets, and Kunal is a macroeconomist. Senior recruiting is ongoing, and I hope to have some positive news to report in my next letter.
Several of our faculty members have received honors and recognition. Harry Pei was awarded an NSF CAREER Fellowship. Ben Golub and Marciano Siniscalchi were elected as Fellows of the Econometric Society. Marios Angeletos, Piotr Dworczak, and Ben Golub were elected as Fellows of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. Elisa Jacome and Diego Kanzig were appointed Faculty Research Fellows of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Bo Jackson continues to serve as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. Joel Mokyr received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Lyon. Ian Savage was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Transportation Researcher Award from the Transportation Research Forum.
Several of our former students also received recognition. Laura Doval (Ph.D. 2016) was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. Michelle Alexopoulos (Ph.D. 1999) completed her term as President of the Canadian Economics Association.
We are saying goodbye to another class of Ph.D. students who have been placed throughout the private sector, government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, and tenure-track positions at prestigious academic institutions, including Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Penn Wharton, Tel Aviv, UCLA Anderson, Virginia, and Vanderbilt. We are delighted with the outstanding work of our graduate students. At the same time, we look forward to the arrival in August of our entering Ph.D. class, among the most diverse we have accepted.
We held a number of events this past academic year, including a conference in honor of Ariel Pakes of Harvard, the winner of the 2022 Nemmers Prize in Economics, and another conference in honor of our former colleague Michael Whinston of MIT. We honored the memory of Dale Mortensen, our former colleague who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2010, with a lecture by Robert Shimer of the University of Chicago. The lecture was attended by Bev Mortensen and many Mortensen family members. We also hosted Gita Gopinath of the International Monetary Fund, who presented the Susan Bies Lecture on Economics and Public Policy this spring.
The 2024 Nemmers Prize in Economics has been awarded to Michael Woodford of Columbia University. He was recognized for his achievements “advancing the New Keynesian approach to understanding economic fluctuations in general equilibrium, bridging the theory and the practice of monetary policy, and incorporating bounded rationality in macroeconomics.”
Once again, we would like to thank you for your unwavering support and generosity. We could not have accomplished all that we have without your help, and we are deeply grateful for your commitment to our department and our mission.
When you next visit campus, please feel free to drop by the Economics Department and see for yourself the vibrancy and excitement that our community continues to generate. Until then, please enjoy your summer.