Postdoctoral and Graduate Fellows: Academic Year 2026–27

Christian Valencia received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research sits at the intersection of labor and agricultural economics, studying how rising hiring costs shape farm input use and productivity.

Pimmy Pinitjitsamut's research focuses on the economics of crime and policing. She examines how police compensation and departmental financial constraints influence officer performance and the use of force. Her current work investigates a workforce policy that shapes both the composition of the police workforce and officers' behavior on the job.

Mamdouh Abdelkader is a Research Economist at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on how fiscal policy and innovation support shape technological change, productivity, investment, labour demand, and capital allocation.

Charu Gupta is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the economics of innovation in health care markets. Her papers examine the role of "imperfect" or non-standard intellectual property rights in pharmaceutical competition; the impact of government regulation on firm R&D decisions; and the nature and size of portfolio effects for multiproduct firms. She holds a PhD in Managerial Science & Applied Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Nizar Jouini received his PhD from the Université François-Rabelais de Tours. He is Associate Professor of Public Economics at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and Visiting Scholar at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on returns to R&D investment and innovation equity, with broader interests in fiscal policy, political economy, and development economics, emphasizing distributional outcomes and institutional reform in MENA and African economies.

Zachary Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Union College. His research as a development economist examines the effects of local innovation funding on community colleges in the US.

Connie Xu is a PhD candidate at Harvard studying the economics of life sciences innovation. Her research examines how capital, institutional environments, and market structure shape scientific discovery. 

Camila Morales is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and Research Director of the Texas Schools Project. Her research examines barriers to educational attainment and labor market success among historically underserved students, as well as the effectiveness of policies designed to reduce these disparities. As an NBER Postdoctoral Fellow, she will study the labor market value of community college bachelor’s degrees and other pathways that expand educational opportunity and economic mobility.

Sobia Jafry’s research examines the distributional and behavioural effects of tax policy, with a particular focus on capital gains taxation, household finance and income inequality. Prior to her PhD, she spent nearly a decade in the investment industry, managing assets for both a public pension fund and an actively managed equity mutual fund. Drawing on this professional experience, her research combines economic theory with applied econometric methods to study how individuals respond to taxation and financial incentives, and the implications for public policy.

Jorge Colmenares studies how household balance sheets shape economic decisions under labor market risk, with a focus on retirement savings, unemployment, and job search.

Matthew Jacob is studying the intergenerational effects of foreclosure on the economic trajectories of parents and children.

Prateek Mahajan is a PhD candidate in Finance at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He studies why homeownership among young households fell sharply after the Global Financial Crisis.

Dominic Russel studies household borrowing behavior, lender incentives in consumer financial markets, and the impacts of credit on inequality.

Claire Shi is studying household debt, with a focus on repayment decisions, how parents shape the borrowing behaviors of their children, and lender contract design.

Selene Cueva is a PhD student at Boston University. Her research studies how high-skilled migration and government policies shape the rate, direction, and geography of innovation.

Chieh-Hsuan Hu is a PhD candidate in Economics at Boston University, specializing in empirical industrial organization. Her research focuses on defense procurement and examines how contract designs influence product positioning and market structure.

Bora Ozaltun is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley studying environmental economics and industrial organization. His research examines how firms respond to environmental policies. His current work studies how public participation in environmental permitting affects firm siting decisions, how firms bunch in response to size-based regulations, and how incumbent firm decisions shape green technology diffusion.

Christopher Tice-Raskin is a PhD student in macroeconomics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research examines the returns to government R&D spending, with a particular focus on whether government investment in fundamental research generates different outcomes than investment in applied research.

Amelia Yao is an applied economist with focus on innovation, especially pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. Her research studies how policy impacts innovation incentive and activities in the long run and explores alternatively better policy design. 

Seungmin Yoo is a PhD candidate in Strategy & Innovation at Boston University. His research examines how high-skilled migrants shape innovation and entrepreneurship, focusing on student immigration and return migration.

Asha Bharadwaj research focuses on household economics, human capital, and gender. In one project, she studies how constraints on marriage timing affect women's educational attainment in India. Using variation from a common social norm that daughters marry in birth order, she first estimates the causal effect, and then develop an equilibrium model of marriage and schooling decisions to analyze the effects of raising the minimum legal age of marriage. Her other projects examine how childbirth affects intrahousehold resource allocation in Japan, and evaluate the impact of firearm dispossession laws on intimate partner violence in the US.

Giacomo Marcolin studies discrimination based on expected and realized fertility. Using both historical and recent policy changes, his research aims to quantify how these mechanisms contribute to observed gender gaps in the labor market and to derive implications for policy design.

Lily Seitelman studies labor market outcomes for individuals and families across a variety of demographic groups. She is currently working on two projects focusing on gender labor market outcomes. The first uses US Census data to explore how individuals have been affected by their spouses gaining work-from-home positions both full-time and through hybrid offerings; the second uses Danish administrative data to look at how parents have been are affected by having a child with a severe disability.

Marty Haoyuan Chen is studying topics at the intersection of economics of education, information economics, and experimental economics, examining how the private tutoring market, standardized testing policies, and college admission mechanisms affect student outcomes and access to higher education.

Deborah Gaisie’s research interests are in the economics of education and labor economics. Her work examines how educational policies shape inequities in human capital outcomes and the labor market effects of changes in the structure of higher education markets.

Ida Grigoryeva is an Economics PhD Candidate at UC San Diego interested in development, migration, education, and wellbeing. Her research focuses on institutional and psychological barriers to accessing educational opportunities and upward mobility in developing countries, including psychological constraints.

Seung Hyeong Lee studies topics at the intersection of labor economics, macroeconomics, and finance. His research examines human capital development, including the effects of selective mathematics and science education, as well as its broader implications for the labor force and corporate investment in human capital.

Justine Weng is a PhD candidate in economics whose research focuses on education. She is studying the impacts of policies that expand access to advanced math coursework.