Matt Ardell ’10 grew up dreaming of working for Nike. Now, five years after graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in economics and history, he is living his dream at Nike’s corporate headquarters in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. As a football marketing field rep, Ardell travels the country building relationships with head coaches, athletic directors, and teams. The foundation for his success in the business world, he said, is his liberal arts education. “I chose Arts and Letters specifically because you can do anything you want with that degree,” he said. “The strategies you learn—critical thinking and different ways to look at a problem—are useful no matter where you go.”

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Read Professor Eric Sims' thoughts on the danger of negative interest rates here…

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Nine months before his May 2016 graduation, Matt Castellini knew where he was headed after Notre Dame. An economics major enrolled in the department’s new Financial Economics and Econometrics concentration (FEE), Castellini landed a job as a credit sales analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch after interning with the company last summer. He’s not alone, either. Just one year into the new program, the concentration’s first cohort has yet to graduate, but many have positions waiting for them at firms such as Boston Consulting Group, Mercer Consulting, and Deutsche Bank.

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In a dense Nairobi slum best known for its toxic garbage dump, the crowded streets are lined with roadside stands. With no job prospects, residents’ best chance to eke out a living comes from selling foods and handcrafted goods at these tiny stalls. Three assistant professors in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics—Wyatt Brooks, Kevin Donovan, and Terence Johnson—are researching ways to help those entrepreneurs succeed and increase their income.

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Notre Dame’s Department of Economics added expertise in education, energy, sovereign debt, and consumer market behavior with the appointments this fall of four new faculty members. The fast-growing department is continually looking to add faculty who best fit with its mission and the University’s mission, said William Evans, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics and chair of the department, which often leads to new hires with varying research and teaching interests. That’s exactly the case with new assistant professors Christiane Baumeister, Chloe Gibbs, and Zachary Stangebye and assistant teaching professor Forrest Spence.

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