News and Accolades for faculty.
Faculty News
Friday, November 8, 2019
New Faculty
We are pleased to introduce you to a faculty member who joined the department in fall 2018 and five faculty members who began teaching in the fall 2019 semester.
Ala Avoyan
Ala Avoyan joined Indiana University in fall of 2018. Her research interests are in microeconomic theory and experimental economics, focusing on communication in strategic environments and on attention in decision problems and games. She is from Tbilisi, Georgia, where she received her B.Sc. in Mathematics and M.A. in Economics. Prof. Avoyan earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 2018.
Joshua Bernstein
Joshua Bernstein’s research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and public finance, with a specific focus on the design and effects of macroeconomic policies when households are heterogeneous in some dimension and financial markets are incomplete. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2019.
Rupal Kamdar
Rupal Kamdar joined Indiana University in the fall of 2019. Her interests lie broadly in the field macroeconomics. In her most recent work, she has used empirical and theoretical methodologies to better understand how economic agents form their expectations. Rupal holds a B.A. in Economic Theory and Mathematics from New York University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Laura Liu
Laura Liu’s research interests encompass macroeconomics, econometrics, and network economics. She has been developing and implementing methods that facilitate estimation and improve forecasting performance in large-dimensional frameworks, with empirical applications mainly in macroeconomic and network economic setups. Her recent research topics include panel data and forecasting, structural macro models with granular data, and networks analysis from a time-series perspective. Her research has been published in Econometrica and Journal of Applied Econometrics.
Laura Liu received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Her dissertation, “Point and Density Forecasts in Panel Data Models,” received the 2018 Arnold Zellner Thesis Award in Econometrics and Statistics from the American Statistical Association (ASA) section of Business and Economic Statistics and the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics.
Christian Matthes
Christian Matthes works at the intersection of macroeconomics and econometrics. His main research interests are the econometric analysis of dynamic equilibrium models, the development of linear and non-linear time series models for macroeconomic data, as well as the study of equilibrium models with imperfect information.
A native of Germany, Christian received his undergraduate degree at Goethe University in Frankfurt before coming to the U.S. for his doctoral studies at NYU, where he received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.
Prior to coming to IU, Christian worked at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona from 2010-2013 and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s research department from 2013 until he joined IU in 2019.
Carl Sanders
Dr. Sanders’ research focuses on labor economics, with an emphasis on empirical analysis of worker skills and the interactions of skills with job requirements. Specific labor market contexts considered in Dr. Sanders’ work include immigrant experiences in the U.S. labor market, the respective importance of math and reading skills in earnings, and the racial wage gap. His teaching experience includes both undergraduate and graduate level classes in econometrics and microeconomics.
Before joining Indiana University Bloomington, Dr. Sanders was Assistant Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He also held visiting positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Sanders obtained his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an A.B. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Faculty Promotions
Mostafa Beshkar was promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Beshkar joined our faculty in 2013. He came to IU following three years on the faculty at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Beshkar earned the Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University in 2008. His research interests include international trade and applied microeconomics.
Faculty Honors
Lee Alston received a Becker-Freidman fellowship at the University of Chicago and a distinguished visiting professorship at Monash University in Australia.
In May 2019, Yoosoon Chang was elected to be a member of the Executive Committee of Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics.
In 2018, Filomena Garcia, Gustavo Torrens and Jose Paz y Mino Lay (Ph.D., IU, Economics, 2019) received an award from the Portuguese Economics Ministry for the best paper in “Market Competition” for their paper entitled “Of Course Collusion Should be Prosecuted. But Maybe… Or (The case for international antitrust agreements)”.
James Walker and Stefan Weiergraeber received the IU Trustees Teaching Award in 2018. Bulent Guler and Todd Walker were recipients of this award in 2019. The Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award was established to honor individuals who have a positive impact on learning through the direct teaching of students, especially undergraduates.
Ke-Li Xu was recognized as a Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics at the 2018 ASSA Annual Meeting at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Faculty News and Accomplishments
Lee Alston co-authored Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Learn more about this book in the Publication Spotlight article.
Robert Becker presented his co-authored paper “Recursive Utility and Turnpike Theory: A Thompson Aggregator Example” at the International Conference: Real and Financial Interdependencies, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France, on June 25, 2019.
Mostafa Beshkar presented his paper “Optimal Trade Policy and Trade Imbalances” on April 13, 2019 at the Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference on Public Policy, On the Border of International Cooperation.
Yoosoon Chang received a research grant in April 2019 from the Bank of Korea for the project “Analysis of Korean Yield Curve Using Functional Time Series Method”. In May 2019, she was elected a member of the Executive Committee of SNDE (Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics) and in June 2019 Professor Chang was appointed an organizer for SETA (Symposium on Econometric Theory and Applications). She was co-organizer for the 2019 Workshop on Energy Economics: Econometric Analysis of Energy Demand and Climate Change held in Seoul-Jeju, Korea from May 25-27, 2019.
Laura Liu co-authored “Forecasting with Dynamic Panel Data Models” which has been accepted for publication in Econometrica in June 2019.
Joon Park attended the International Conference on the Economics of Oil, March 1-2, 2018, hosted by FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he was a keynote speaker. A keynote speaker at the SETA 2019 (Symposium on Econometric Theory and Applications), June 1-2 at Osaka University in Japan, he gave the SETA lecture on “Understanding Regressions with Observations Collected at High Frequency over Long Span”. Professor Park was an invited speaker at the Korean Economic Review International Conference held in Seoul, Korea on August 8-9, 2019. The title of his talk was “Identifying and Estimating Economic Models with Spatial and Temporal Profiles”. Professor Park was a co-organizer of the 2019 Workshop on Energy Economics: Econometric Analysis of Energy Demand and Climate Change. From May 2017 to April 2019, Professor Park was an advisor for the Economics Research Institute at the Bank of Korea.
James Walker co-authored “The Market for Talent: Competition for Resources and Self-Governance in Teams” with Abhijit Ramalingam (Ph.D., IU, Economics, 2010) and Brock Stoddard (Ph.D., IU, Economics, 2013), which was published in Games and Economic Behavior, 114, (2019), 268-284. Professor Walker also co-authored “Peer punishment of acts of omission versus acts of commission in give and take social dilemmas” published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 164, (2019), 133-147. Abhijit Ramalingam was one of his co-authors for this article.
Ke-Li Xu authored “A Semi-Nonparametric Estimator of Regression Discontinuity Design with Discrete Duration Outcomes” in the Journal of Econometrics, 206(1), (2018), 258-278. “Inference for Local Regression in the Presence of Nuisance Parameters” has been accepted by the Journal of Econometrics. Professor Xu presented “Testing for Multiple-Horizon Predictability” at the Econometric Society Summer Meeting in Davis, California.
The College of Arts