2023 Economics PhDs in Development and Trade
Sheng (Charles) Cai has focused on the growth impact of international and spatial knowledge spillovers. Charles will join the City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor.
I am grateful for my time at Yale. This is where I grow as a researcher. I greatly benefited from the knowledge spillovers from the amazing faculty members and colleagues. – Sheng (Charles) Cai
Charles’ dissertation models the role of multinational firms in spreading technological know-how, promoting foreign innovation, and driving economic growth around the world. A unique feature is that his analysis (in collaboration with Wei Xiang) combines multinational production with international trade in a dynamic model. The analysis can speak to issues such as the short-run and long-run effect of sanctions, such as those on Russia, that have greatly curtailed multinational activity there. A bottom line is that the short-run effect on economic activity is typically limited, while the long-run effect can be devastating. – Samuel Kortum, James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics
Zara Contractor has focused on dimensions of wage inequality. Zara will join Middlebury College as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department.
My time at Yale was an incredible experience, and I am extremely grateful to have been part of such a collaborative and supportive research community. – Zara Contractor
Zara’s dissertation breaks genuinely new ground on an extremely salient and timely topic, the impact of software in the workplace. The combination of micro data of unprecedented scope and detail on job openings, creative causal identification, and a novel theoretical framework of task-based production with hard skill requirements, move the research frontier beyond the generic notion of skill-biased technical change, and provide a compelling and concrete analysis of its main manifestation. Software causes upskilling and raises inequality in labor demand and earnings among workers, even within the same occupation. The resulting effects on employment reallocation, within and between employers, are profound. We have much to learn from Zara’s exciting research agenda. – Giuseppe Moscarini, Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economics
Lucas Conwell has applied development and trade tools to study the government role in the provision of transportation. Lucas will join University College London as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics.
Without EGC’s very generous Ph.D. grants, convincingly quantifying the supply side of informal transit markets and commuter preferences for different policy interventions would have been almost impossible, given the paucity of existing data on these networks. The technical guidance provided by my EGC advisors and the capable administrative support offered by EGC staff allowed me to put these funds to use hiring a local firm to track minibus operations and conduct a commuter survey. – Lucas Conwell
Rapidly urbanizing cities are engines of growth, and many people flock to cities to earn a better living, but many neighborhoods within those cities, especially those served by any existing public transit, are expensive to live in. As a result, many low-income workers commute long distances but live in neighborhoods not well served by public transit. To serve these workers’ demand for commutes, a system of privatized shared transit has organically developed. The system may appear chaotic, but it may also be efficient, if the “invisible hand” of the market connects minibus operators to commuters. Conwell combines spatial modeling with primary data collection on Cape Town’s informal, decentralized privatized public transit sector to ask whether any government interventions could improve productivity and welfare in this privatized public transit market. – Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics and Management
Lucas Finamor has worked at the intersection of labor economics, public finance, and development economics. Lucas will serve as a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London for the 2023-2024 academic year then join the São Paulo School of Economics from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) as an Assistant Professor in August 2024.
My years in the Ph.D. program at Yale were outstanding. I received sharp academic training, which was essential for developing my research agenda. The formative components were not restricted to the first years of courses. I learned much from each conversation with faculty, students, and visitors. Attending seminars and conferences, many of each sponsored by the EGC, I could learn from being exposed to cutting-edge research and observing the interactions and discussions. All this professional development was achieved in a respectful and nurturing environment that I will greatly miss. – Lucas Finamor
In his thesis Lucas studies how features of pension and unemployment insurance systems affect labor supply decisions in countries with widespread informal employment (i.e. jobs where workers do not pay taxes and do not accrue social insurance benefits and where employers do not necessarily abide by employment regulations). His work develops new insights into the likely effects of recent reforms to the Chilean pension system, reforms that are very similar to those under consideration in many other countries. Certain policies designed to extend working lives may do so, but only part of those extra years are likely to be spent working in the formal sector. The work in this thesis has important implications for our understanding of the effect of policies being debated as governments wrestle with challenges associated with aging populations. – Cormac O'Dea, Assistant Professor of Economics
Matthew Gordon, a development-focused PhD student at the Yale School of Environment, has focused on the distributional consequences of environmental policy in low-income countries using structural econometrics, causal inference, and machine learning. In fall 2023, Matthew will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the Paris School of Economics.
The faculty in the Yale development group taught me what it means to ask and answer important questions. It sounds very simple, but I think it is much harder than teaching methods or statistical tools – although I learned those too. Defending my research in the development seminar more than prepared me for the job market. – Matthew Gordon
Relief distribution after natural disasters is often targeted based on damage assessment: if a hurricane or earthquake or flood visibly damages a home, then the relief agency provides support to its owner. Gordon’s key insight is that how a disaster affects each household’s welfare depends more on how vulnerable that household is, rather than how much property it lost. That would in turn depend on the level of informal insurance the household possesses – e.g. does it have a member in a different location who sends them remittances? This vulnerability or “consumption smoothing ability” is very difficult to observe while physical damages from disaster are visible and verifiable, so it’s easy to understand why disaster relief agencies focus more on the property damage assessments. Matt’s research clarifies that this is not the correct way to go about relief targeting. The paper provides rigorous guidance on how we can improve welfare through alternative targeting methods. His paper is an excellent example of the value of careful, deep economic analysis to clarify issues that are important for policy, but those issues were not obvious until you bring rigorous theory and data to bear on the question. – Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics and Management
Antonia Paredes-Haz studies political economy and development, focusing on identity politics, which represents a threat to the ability of democracies to provide inclusive governance, particularly in low-income settings. Antonia is joining the University of California, Berkeley Haas Business School as a postdoctoral fellow.
EGC exposed me to scholars conducting research in numerous countries and contexts. Having professors who understand both the Latin American context and how my research can be generalized to other regions of the world was extremely beneficial. – Antonia Paredes-Haz
Antonia’s dissertation addresses classic questions in political economy like how citizens’ trade-off preferences across different dimensions of candidate identity when voting, how electoral institution design affects this trade-off, and how voter behavior impacts legislator identity and policy outcomes. Women the world over remain remain underrepresented in politics. Gender quotas on party candidate lists have been a significant policy response, but we know very little about how these quotas affect voter behavior. For instance, if citizens simply continue to vote for male candidates, women elected due to gender parity requirements may not fully represent voter preferences – and the lack of voter support for them may also constrain their effectiveness as legislators. Antonia’s research on the impacts of gender parity rules in Chilean constitutional convention elections sheds light on these questions. – Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center
Yunqing Huang will serve the Ministry of Education in Singapore as a scholarship recipient. .
Romil Pandey will join the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University as a Research Analyst for Professors Dean Karlan and Chris Udry.
Alex Philip will be working at Harvard Business School as a predoc for Professor Amitabh Chandra.
