The Sylff Fellowships at Yale University

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 2025-26 academic year in recognition of their excellence in the areas of development economics and trade.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.