Assistant Professor

My research interests cover the broader themes of inequality, entrepreneurship, labour supply, and taxation. Within the field of macroeconomics, these topics can be studied using the theoretical and quantitative methods from the literature on macroeconomic modeling with heterogeneous agents. These models are built on a strong empirical foundation using household- or firm-level microdata and allow researchers to study the whole distribution of households in the economy.

Some of my past research projects have used these models to look at the consequences of higher top income taxes in a world where agents not only differ in income and wealth but also occupation or the role of taxation in the evolution of married couples’ labour supply over the last three decades. Current projects focus on the role of housing and entrepreneurship in shaping wealth inequality and rates of return, the impact of discriminatory housing policies on the racial wealth gap in the United States, or the nature of the secondary market for entrepreneurial firms in Canada.

Chair of Graduate Studies, Professor

My research interests are in many areas of macroeconomics, monetary economics and their intersections with international economics and development. My recent interests lie in understanding the economics of sovereign defaults and the government sector more generally with an emphasis on the role of institutions and political economy. My earlier work was more focused on business cycles in closed and open economies.

Chair, Associate Professor

My research has focussed on understanding business cycle fluctuations. In my work, I use dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to look for macroeconomic shocks and propagation mechanisms that help theoretical models produce business cycle fluctuations that looked like those observed in Canada, the United States, and emerging countries. Many of my research projects have focussed on open-economy dimensions like movements in the trade balance, the current account, and the co-movement of economic fluctuations across countries.

Assistant Professor

I am a quantitative macro economist, combining theory, data and computational methods to understand various facets of markets and the macro economy. Much of my work lies at the intersection of firms and workers, studying entrepreneurship, firm dynamics and wealth. Recent papers examine the role of business re-sale in entrepreneurial decisions or how consumer learning about product quality explains patterns of firm dynamics.

While economic models form the basis of my research, I often work with novel data sources (Yelp reviews or firm sale data from an online marketplace) or large administrative data sets (restricted US Census data or the CEEDD from Statistics Canada). Additional areas of study apply quantitative methods to policy areas of interest, such as the impact of redlining on the racial wealth gap in the US. I also believe strongly in the need for students to learn quantitative skills, designing the MAEP Macroeconomics course I teach around Python applications.

Associate Chair, Associate Professor

My research is in International Trade and in Macroeconomics, where I explore theoretical, empirical, and quantitative questions. In my research in International Trade, I have studied the sources of the welfare gains from trade, the adequacy of current trade models to predict trade liberalization, and the changing patterns between rich and poor countries over the last two centuries. In my research in Macroeconomics, I have studied the fiscal policy nature of default episodes, the adequacy of modern macro models considering the labor share decline, and the sources of the Canadian economy’s productivity slowdown.

Assistant Professor