In the spring of 2021, at the height of the pandemic, four of our Ph.D. students graduated and accepted positions at the Bank of Korea, JP Morgan Chase, Lehigh University, and the School of Business at Macau University of Science and Technology. We currently have nine students on the spring 2022 job market. Twelve new Ph.D. students joined our program in Fall 2021.

Our graduate students presented at several prestigious conferences, including the Midwest International Trade Meetings and the Southern Economics Association meetings. Five of our Ph.D. students received travel awards to attend conferences which are generously funded by members of the Duesterberg family. The Daniel J. Duesterberg Award honors the memory of Dan Duesterberg, an alumnus of the IU Department of Economics Ph.D. program. This year's recipients of this award were Kairong Chen, Seokil Kang, Seunghee Lee, Kelin Lu, and Siying Ding. These awards are very important to our Ph.D. students, giving them an opportunity to attend, and in many cases present their research, at professional conferences which enhances their future job prospects.

The department recognizes the importance of coding skills among our Ph.D. students. In Spring 2021 we organized two mini-courses: one in R and one in Python, taught by our students Joe Westenberg and Kairong Chen. In Spring 2022, we are planning one more coding course which will be taught by Joe Seidel.