The global Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) seeks to “identify and nurture leaders who will initiate action to transcend differences in nationality, language, ethnicity, religion, and political systems and who have the integrity, determination, and expertise to bring about positive social change in global society and the local community”. Since its inception in 1987, Sylff has evolved into a global fellowship program administered at 69 world-leading institutions of higher learning in 44 countries. To date, about 16,000 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences have received fellowships, and these Sylff fellows have gone on to become leaders in a variety of fields following graduation.
In keeping with the Sylff Association’s vision, the Sylff Program at EGC provides a number of fellowship awards each year to outstanding economics PhD students in development economics and trade at Yale. These awards are in the form of a scholarship to cover tuition and fees, a living stipend, and a $4000 additional stipend.
The EGC also has a separate Sylff research fund for grants of up to $40,000 for PhD students in Economics at Yale for projects focused on international development and trade. To learn more about Sylff research grants, visit: EGC Research Grants for PhD Students
The Global SYLFF Association is a collaborative initiative of The Nippon Foundation, the endowment donor, and the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research as program administrator. For more information, visit Sylff.org.
Fellowship Award Process
Sylff fellowship awards are allocated by the Sylff Faculty Selection Committee at EGC, which convenes each year to determine the recipients of these fellowships for the current academic year. There are no applications for these awards, as fellows will be independently nominated by EGC faculty affiliates and then selected by the committee from among the current eligible PhD students, with consideration of current grade point average. The 2023-2024 Sylff Faculty Selection Committee at EGC consists of:
Mushfiq Mobarak
Rohini Pande
Michael Peters
Nicholas Ryan
Current Sylff Fellows
The following Yale PhD students have been selected as Sylff fellows in the 2034-24 academic year in recognition of their excellence in the areas of development economics and trade.
Tianyu Fan (2023-2024)
Tianyu Fan is a fourth year PhD student studying the distributional consequences of economic development, trade, and growth. In one project, Tianyu explores the impact of differential inflation rates on the welfare of different groups of agents in the context of incomplete price data. Specifically, he investigates how non-homothetic preferences and differential consumption patterns among different income groups can complicate the measurement of inflation and welfare inequality. He addresses the difficulty of measuring inflation for services, which account for a significant portion of modern economies and are particularly challenging to deflate due to improvements in quality and variety.
In another ongoing project, Tianyu is studying the dynamics of inequality and economic growth. Innovation and creative destruction increase the welfare of households while also shaping the distribution of income. On the other hand, income distribution matters for the market and incentives for innovation on different goods. Tianyu studies the joint dynamic of inequality and economic growth and its welfare consequences for people in the different positions of the income ladder.
Miho Hong (2023-2024)
Miho Hong is a fifth year PhD student studying theoretical and empirical market design. In a project joint with Nicolò Generoso, she studies the produce market in South Korea, where a few licensed platforms auction off farmers’ crops in wholesale markets. To benefit market participants from economies of scale created by network effects, the government restricts platform entry. However, the welfare effects of such a policy are unclear since it endows the platforms with market power to extract surplus from farmers, which depresses supply. In addition, herding in metropolitan markets may hurt consumers in non-urban areas. Miho and her coauthor aim to estimate the welfare effects of restricting entry and the spatial distribution of surplus by building a structural model and bringing it to data.
Roberto Lee (2023-2024)
Roberto Lee is a fourth year PhD student studying spatial economics and environmental economics. His research focuses on the interplay between land use and local economic development. In one project, Roberto studies the economic effects of a large decrease in deforestation rates that occurred in the Brazilian Amazon driven by command and control policies. As these policies mainly hinder the expansion of pasture land, the agricultural sector is particularly affected by them. Nevertheless, locals may respond to these changes by switching sectors or migrating out of the region. Then, to quantify the economic effects of hindering deforestation, Roberto uses a dynamic spatial model of land use, where agents are allowed to choose in which sector to work and where to migrate. The model is estimated using various sources of remote sensing data on land use and deforestation.
Ryungha Oh (2023-2024)
Ryungha Oh is a sixth year PhD student studying macroeconomics and spatial economics. Her research focuses on spatial sorting of workers and firms and the resulting spatial disparities. She develops a new theory of two-sided sorting in which heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space. She shows that these location decisions can account for dense cities populated by more productive workers and firms. Shen then argues that this mechanism provides distinctive policy implications compared to those implied by one-sided sorting that lacks heterogeneity in either workers or firms. When both workers and firms move together, their relocation does not necessarily lead to changes in output. Thus, dispersing workers and firms toward less dense areas can mitigate congestion without reducing output, leading to welfare gains.
Sabrina Peng (2023-2024)
Sabrina Peng is a third year PhD student studying international and development economics from the perspective of firms. Her specific interests include learning, international knowledge diffusion, and industrial upgrading. In episodes of opening up to trade, firms in the developing world get exposed to more frontier technologies abroad and, over time, begin to produce in product categories and varieties that had to rely on imports before. How to encourage this catch-up in technical capability is of interest to policy makers. Her work asks how learning of the technical know-how happens on a micro level and what role traded goods play in this process.
Christina M. Qiu (2023-2024)
Christina M. Qiu is a fourth year PhD student and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her research focuses on trade and spatial economics. She received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar. One of her projects examines the impact of mobile money adoption on village insurance networks in Tanzania. She enfolds spatial correlation of location productivity shocks into a model of labor search. Mobile money adoption facilitates the formation of remote remittance networks, allowing households to smooth income shocks without reliance on village mechanisms. She finds evidence for the crowding out of village insurance consistent with moderately positive selection into mobile money adoption.
Matthew Schwartzman (2023-2024)
Matthew Schwartzman is a fifth year PhD student studying structural transformation within the personal service sector. In poor countries, self-employed entrepreneurs operating mom-and-pop shops or hawker stalls account for the majority of employment in sectors like retail and food service. As countries get richer, large modern service firms replace these small-scale entrepreneurs. Matthew's research uses micro-data on employment and consumption to measure the contribution of three distinct forces to this transformation of personal services: income effects on consumer demand, better matching between workers and firms, and rising productivity of modern service firms.
Sylff Alumni on Campus
Jingyi Cui (2022-2023)
Jingyi Cui is a fourth year PhD student studying remote services trade, where workers provide online services such as data analytics to foreign firms. The ability to export services without the physical movement of persons or goods produces exciting opportunities, especially movement of persons or goods produces exciting opportunities, especially for workers in developing countries. At the same time, traditional trade frictions, such as information problems, still exist when trade occurs online. These frictions can curtail the growth of remote services trade.
In one project, Jingyi studies how firms search for international workers to complete service tasks on an online matching platform. Search frictions can make firms reluctant to hire foreign workers and can differentially affect workers depending on their backgrounds. She examines how a particular platform feature can ease these frictions and believes that lessons from this platform have broad applications in the services trade. Additionally, using data from a private company that helps firms with legal and payroll challenges in hiring international workers, Jingyi and fellow Yale PhD student Samuel Solomon analyze hiring patterns in this international labor market, which they hope can help shape policies on global remote work.
Rodrigo Guerrero Castaneda (2020-21, 2021-22)
Rodrigo Guerrero Castaneda's research focuses on the economics of the family and aging in developing countries. Lately, Guerrero Castaneda has been studying mortality of a primary earner as a source of financial risk among low-income families. Using data from India and Indonesia, he explores the inefficiencies that result from informal mechanisms aimed at mitigating mortality risk. A common informal insurance agreement is one based on filial responsibility. This may work well in most cases, yet it is likely to fail in the case of a premature death, especially if the children are still school aged. In a related project, Guerrero Castaneda studies the effects of intergenerational co-residence norms on children’s spatial mobility and education.
Nghiem Huynh (2022-2023)
Nghiem Huynh is a sixth year PhD student studying economic development and spatial economics. His current research examines the impact of policies on the distribution of economic activity within developing countries, with a particular focus on Vietnam. Using firm and migration data, Nghiem examines place-based policies designed to stimulate development in underprivileged areas of Vietnam. In addition, Nghiem has developed a dynamic model to understand the tradeoffs of these policies and estimate their welfare effect. In another project, Nghiem explores the relationship between the recent rise in the sex ratio at birth in Vietnam and the country's trade policy with the United States.
Jack Liang(2022-23)
Jack Liang is a fourth year PhD student studying macroeconomics and trade, with a focus on firm growth and dynamics and spatial policies. He is working on a project examining how management and organizational capital can mediate the spread of productivity across a firm's plants. Jack uses confidential US Census microdata to document that firms with better measured management are more able to add plants and spread these plants further in space. Using quantitative spatial models to highlight the implications of the accumulation of this form of organizational capital on the firm's decision to establish new plants, he finds that the firms most eager to grow are those least constrained by their current managerial abilities.
Additionally, in a joint project with another Sylff Alum Wei Xiang, Jack is studying how simultaneous labor and product market distortions in the form of markups and markdowns can jointly influence the set of firms operating in a market, as well as local welfare. They find that firm entry in a non-tradable sector (e.g., a local service sector such as restaurants) can have strong pro-competitive effects on both the local product and local labor markets. However, the impact of firm entry in the tradable sector (e.g., manufacturing) will have its product market response dampened by inter-regional trade.
Jillian Stallman (2022-2023)
Jillian Stallman is a fourth year PhD student studying the intersections between development, political economy, and the environment. She's currently working on projects related to the motivations behind international accords in general and focusing on solar geoengineering. These projects are part of a broader investigation into how foreign actors influence development elsewhere. Her current research draws on game and network theory, employing a variety of data sources ranging from climate simulations to trade flows to machine-learning analyses of the text of fishing treaties.
Siu Yuat Wong (2018-2019)
Siu Yuat Wong is an eighth year PhD student studying macroeconomics and trade. His research focuses on the costly sacrifice of time away from family and loved ones by migrating parents, which is often justified with the sole objective of improving the livelihoods and educational prospects of their left-behind children. Siu Yat Wong's project addresses the question of how temporary migration impacts the educational outcomes of these left-behind children by using a structural model. This model will be estimated using a novel dataset he will be collecting from the Philippines.
Yan Yan (2022-2023)
Yan Yan is a fifth year PhD student studying international trade and environmental economics. Yan examines how free riding makes it impossible to shut down leakage channels in an integrated global economy. Since it is difficult to fully analyze the overall effects of carbon policies, Yan focuses on the construction sector, which requires steel and cement, the two top emitters, as its inputs. He studies the policy implications, considering various carbon leakage channels and industry dynamics. In another ongoing project, Yan and coauthors are studying the effect of international knowledge diffusion and import competition from trade in the context of the manufacturing sector in China.
Wei Xiang (2021-22)
Wei Xiang is a sixth year PhD student. He studies macro and trade, with a particular interest in growth and inequality. One of his projects tries to understand how income distribution is affected by skill-biased technical change when human capital accumulation is endogenous and subject to idiosyncratic risk. With a heterogenous-agent-continuous-time model, we highlight that skill biased technology change and public education have non-monotonic effects on different wage percentiles. Motivated by the rapid growth of Asian tigers and China, another project studies how multinational production and international trade can generate long-run economic growth through technology diffusion. Developing a quantitative framework and bringing it to data, we quantify the contribution of trade and foreign investment liberalization to past and future growth.
Full listing of Sylff fellows since 2003:
| 2023-2024 |
Tianyu Fan |
| 2022-2023 |
Jingyi Cui |
| 2021 - 2022 |
Lucas Conwell |
| 2020 - 2021 | Julian Aramburu Nathan Barker* Lucas Conwell Rodrigo Guerrero Castaneda Antonia Paredes-Haz* Ryungha Oh |
| 2019 - 2020 | Anisha Grover* Viraj Jorapur* Antonia Paredes-Haz* |
| 2018 - 2019 | Nathan Barker* Tatjana Kleineberg Gaurav Chiplunkar Martin Mattsson* Kritika Narula* Siu Yuat Wong* |
| 2017 - 2018 | Gaurav Chiplunkar Eduardo Fraga* Jonathan Hawkins* Tatjana Kleineberg Martin Mattsson* Kritika Narula* |
| 2016 - 2017 | Gaurav Chiplunkar Taha Choukhmane Eduardo Fraga* Tatjana Kleineberg Martin Mattsson* Kritika Narula* Pengpeng Xiao |
| 2015 - 2016 | Taha Choukhman Tatjana Kleineberg Meredith Startz Hannah Trachtman Jeffrey Weaver Jaya Wen |
| 2014 - 2015 | Shameel Ahmad Sabrin Beg Alex Cohen Julia Garlick Amanda Gregg Xiang Ma Tommaso Porzio Ana Reynoso Gabriella Santangelo Jakob Schneebacher YuJung Whang |
| 2013 - 2014 | Ana Reynoso Jakob Schneebacher Meredith Startz Jeffrey Weaver |
| 2012 - 2013 | Shameel Ahmad Sabrin Beg Julia Garlick Corina Mommaerts Emily Nix Gabriella Santangelo |
| 2011 - 2012 | Cristina Tello-Trilo Xiang Ma Amanda Gregg Alex Cohen Jamin Speer |
| 2010 - 2011 | Muneeza Alam Treb Allen Anant Nyshadham Jaqueline Oliviera Xiaoxue Zhao |
| 2009 - 2010 | James Choy Camilo Dominguez Snaebjorn Gunnsteinsson Melanie Morten Priscila Souza |
| 2008 - 2009 | Reena Badiani Gharad Bryan Federico Guiterrez Rachel Heath Vis Taraz |
| 2007 - 2008 | Achyuta Adhvaryu Prashant Bharadwaj James Fenske |
| 2006 - 2007 | Bruno Falcao Pinar Keskin Daniel Rozenblum Mir Salim |
| 2005 - 2006 | Madhia Afzal Santosh Anagol Christian Awuku-Budu Frank Limbrock Shing-Yi Wang |
| 2004 - 2005 | Lori Beaman Amit Khandelwal Christopher Ksoll Jeremy Magruder |
| 2003 - 2004 | Pei-Yu Lo Siddharth Sharma Tavneet Suri |