Economists With a Range of Specialties Join the Faculty

Six scholars whose research interests range from international trade to issues affecting global health and demography have recently joined the Department of Economics faculty.

Below are brief biographies of the new faculty members.

David Atkin, whose research is at the intersection of economic development and international trade, has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University in 2009. He developed a theoretical model introducing habit formation into a standard model of international trade, based on the assumption that tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. He has studied the correlation between tastes and habits and agricultural trade liberalization. He also examines the predictions of this model of trade with habit formation empirically, using household survey data from India.

Lanier Benkard, who has been appointed a professor of economics, comes to Yale from Stanford University, where he has taught at the Graduate School of Business since 2002. He is a scholar of empirical industrial organization who has made contributions to empirical methods and to the study of dynamic oligopoly. He early work on “learning and forgetting” is considered one of the most influential papers on the subject. He has also made contributions to the computational analysis of dynamic games and has applied them to markets including aircraft production. He earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Yale, in 1994 and 1998, respectively.

Mikhail Golosov, who joins the faculty as a professor of economics, has collaborated with Yale economist Aleh Tsyvinski on a body of work that develops quantitative models of dynamic optimal taxation. He has also been engaged in research on monetary economics. He has taught since 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Amanda Kowalski, an assistant professor, is an econometrician who has also conducted research in health economics. One of her studies examines the extent to which consumers respond to marginal prices for medical care. She earned her Ph.D. from MIT in 2008 and was a postdoctoral fellow in health and aging at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nancy Qian, named an assistant professor, works in the areas of global health and demography. She has examined the effect of gender distribution of household income in “missing women” — the phenomenon of exceptionally high relative female child mortality in many parts of China. She has extended this work with additional research on sex-selective abortion and the tradeoff between fertility and education in China. She has also studied the long-run determinants and consequences of health and nutrition. She has taught at Brown University since 2005.

Guillermo Ordoñez, appointed an assistant professor, is a macroeconomist who conducts research in finance, labor, trade and development. His main research incorporates a model of reputation formation into a macroeconomic model of borrowing and lending in financial markets, leading to a novel theoretical explanation of financial crises and credit crunches. He has also completed studies of wage rigidity in labor markets and the effect of trade liberalization with the adoption of new technologies. He has served since 2008 as a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.