The Sylff Fellowships at Yale University
The Annual Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) fellowship awards recognize outstanding economics PhD students in development economics and trade at Yale.
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. The Sylff Fellows will also receive priority in the allocation of office space for graduate students at EGC. 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 current Sylff Faculty Selection Committee at EGC consists of:
- Amit Khandelwal
- Mushfiq Mobarak
- Rohini Pande
- Nicholas Ryan
Current Sylff Fellows
The following Yale PhD students have been selected as Sylff fellows in the 2024-25 academic year in recognition of their excellence in the areas of development economics and trade.
Miray Omurtak (2025-26)
Miray Omurtak is a third-year Ph.D. student, specializing in development economics, international trade, and political economy. Her research explores how political economy and market frictions shape small firm growth and trade dynamics in low- and middle-income countries. She is particularly interested in how the structure of markets and networks influences both economic opportunities and social cohesion.
Her ongoing field project, coauthored with Onur Altindag, Ceren Baysan, Lydia Assouad, and Carlos Molina, evaluates whether reducing networking frictions can strengthen refugee self-reliance by fostering interethnic business collaboration in Gaziantep, Türkiye. The randomized controlled trial tests a matchmaking service that connects Turkish and Syrian refugee-owned SMEs through a large language model–assisted algorithm, studying its effects on firm performance, trust, and intergroup attitudes.
She is also developing new work on how liquidity and information constraints in agricultural value chains influence product quality and export outcomes, focusing on Turkey’s pistachio industry as an early case study.
Seung-Yong Yoo (2025-26)
Seung-Yong Yoo is a fourth-year PhD student focusing on spatial economics and infrastructure policy. His research examines the welfare implications of infrastructure investment decisions made by firms and governments, emphasizing the distributional consequences, externalities, and strategic interactions that arise from these choices. Seung-Yong studies how infrastructure placement affects economic outcomes in the context of technological transformation and climate change. With fellow PhD student Cheolhwan Kim, he studies the dynamic expansion of public and private chargers and charging access equity. In another project with fellow PhD student Mai Wo, he analyzes firm spatial sorting driven by pecuniary forces, showing how these considerations shape the design of place-based policies.
Cheryl Wu (2025-26)
Cheryl Wu is a third-year Ph.D. student specializing in innovation, growth, and economic history. Her research examines how the diffusion of Western ideas shaped Japan’s industrialization in the nineteenth century. While prior work emphasizes national policy shifts after the Meiji Restoration, less is known about how local exposure to new knowledge translated into firm formation and technology adoption. Cheryl studies villages’ proximity to Edo-period domain schools that taught Western studies and finds that communities nearer to these schools were more likely to host factories in the Meiji period. She is also digitizing and assembling new microdata on Meiji-era factories, firms, and their technologies to track the uptake of industrial methods. Together, this work uncovers how the transmission of ideas catalyzes structural transformation and long-run economic growth.
Stephen Nyarko (2025-26)
Stephen Kojo Nyarko is a third-year PhD student studying development and trade, with a focus on firms and markets. In one project, he investigates the role of state marketing boards in the cocoa sector, where Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire set producer prices and regulate exports, potentially exercising market power over both smallholder farmers and international buyers. This work develops a structural framework to model these institutions as monopolist-monopsonists and quantifies how their pricing decisions shape producer welfare, domestic markets, and global trade outcomes. In another project with fellow Yale PhD student Harriet Brookes Gray, he examines the impact of the Facility-Specific Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM) of the USMCA, a first-of-its-kind cross-border enforcement tool to expedite protection of workers’ rights in Mexico. While labor provisions have been a feature of most modern trade deals, enforcement has historically been limited. This project studies how the RRM’s enhanced mechanisms affect workers and the complex supply chains linking North America and the global economy.
Shoki Kusaka (2024-25, 2025-26)
Shoki Kusaka is a fifth-year PhD student specializing in international trade, spatial economics, and industrial organization. His current research explores the dynamics of exporter entry and exit, with a particular focus on how export-related frictions, especially information frictions, influence the dynamics. In another ongoing project, he investigates labor market power in developing countries, examining how trade liberalization and labor market policies impact wage markdowns, particularly for low-wage production workers, while also considering the spatial distribution of labor and economic activity.
Gabriel Dias Santamarina (2025-26)
Gabriel is a fifth-year Ph.D. student working on projects in industrial organization and development economics. In a project funded by a Sylff research grant, he studies how informal markets and crime affect incentives to invest in electricity infrastructure in Brazil. He examines how a sizable share of non-paying consumers (non-technical losses, NTL) shapes investment in grid reliability and, in turn, consumers welfare and firms surplus. He also shows how poor distribution service quality influences households’ decisions and ultimately deepens within-city social inequalities. The project aims to characterize this ‘underinvestment trap’ and to evaluate how this phenomenon is mediated by the regulatory framework. Finally, he plans to quantify the indirect effects of grid technology upgrades that deter tariff evasion and to evaluate how alternative policies could shift distribution companies’ investment strategies.
Meet Mehta (2025-26)
Meet Mehta is a third-year PhD student in Economics at Yale University interested in topics related to economic development and international trade. His current research examines how large IT services firms in India shape the career trajectories of graduates from lower-tier colleges. In an environment where degrees from mid-tier institutions provide weak signals of ability, these firms—supported by large-scale in-house training programs—act as gateways to better career opportunities. Many mid-tier graduates who begin in Big IT services firms later transition to higher-paying positions in global technology companies. Meet is also interested in studying how frictions in land markets in India shape urbanization and affect farm as well as non-farm sectors.
Sylff Alumni on Campus
Jingyi Cui (2022-23)
Jingyi Cui is a fifth year PhD student examining 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 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.
Tianyu Fan (2023-24)
Tianyu Fan is a fifth 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.
Roberto Lee (2023-24)
Roberto Lee is a fifth 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.
Jack Liang (2022-23)
Jack Liang is a sixth year PhD and Job Market Candidate studying macroeconomics and trade, with a focus on firm growth and dynamics and spatial policies. He is working on a project studying 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 is finding that the firms most eager to grow are those that are 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.
Sabrina Peng (2023-24)
Sabrina Peng is a fourth 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 (2023-24)
Christina M. Qiu is a fifth 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 (2023-24)
Matthew Schwartzman is a sixth year PhD and Job Market Candidate examining why micro-enterprises are prevalent within developing economies. Most recently, he has focused on the retail sector. In contrast to the United States, where a large share of sales take place in superstores like Wal-Mart, many retailers in developing countries do not operate out of a store. Instead, they sell goods from vehicles or portable stalls. These small-scale modes of operation offer firms mobility and flexibility but limit their ability to build a customer base. His work asks if certain features of consumer demand make small-scale retail more viable in impoverished countries than in wealthy countries, or if, instead, these small firms represent "subsistence entrepreneurship" in the absence of other opportunities.
J Stallman (2022-23)
J Stallman is a fifth year PhD student intrigued by 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.
Yan Yan (2022-23)
Yan Yan is a sixth year PhD 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 instead 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.