The summer after his sophomore year, Notre Dame senior J.P. Bruno was packaging maple syrup, taking care of honeybees, and tending to an orchard on a biodynamic farm in Vermont. Three weeks later, he was sitting in the White House, interning for the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) as part of a semester in the Notre Dame Washington Program. These contrasting experiences provided Bruno, an economics and applied and computational mathematics and statistics (ACMS) major, with an assortment of skills that eventually led him to developing his senior thesis and receiving a job offer in economic consulting at the beginning of his senior year.

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Tom Gresik, Faculty Fellow at the Nanovic Institute and Professor in the Notre Dame Economics Department, recently published a paper on income shifting in the Journal of Public Economics and was appointed to the Academic Advisory Board at the Norwegian Center for Taxation.

In a recent interview, Dr. Gresik discusses these accomplishments, along with other European economic issues. For more on the interview, visit the Nanovic Website.

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“We need to have much more proactive policies to include more women in the political process,” said Lakshmi Iyer, associate professor of economics and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Iyer’s research focuses on development economics and political economy. She is currently examining the consequences of electing women to political office in India as well as why certain minority groups there do not get into leadership positions. 

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Nanovic Hall, the state-of-the-art new home to the Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, their affiliated centers and programs, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, includes laboratory and research spaces, classrooms, and offices, all designed to encourage interaction between faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students. It features a soaring, three-story forum to be used for events, the latest video conferencing technology in each of the departmental suites, and a formal mediation room modeled after the United Nations that has translation capabilities for up to three languages.

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A new Notre Dame student club focused on macro-scale economics and fiscal policy won the first national contest it entered, knocking off Harvard University, the defending champion. Notre Dame’s six-person Fiscal Challenge team — which features five Arts and Letters students — developed a plan to stabilize the United States’ debt-to-GDP ratio at current levels through 2046. Notre Dame’s team was chosen as one of three finalists, along with Harvard and Northeastern University, to present its plan live and take questions from a panel of judges.

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The study found that voucher expansion caused significant declines in church donations and church spending on non-educational religious activities.

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From tenure-track positions to top government appointments, Notre Dame's Department of Economics has established a strong track record of job placements for its Ph.D. students.

Recent graduate students have been added to the faculty at the U.S. Military Academy, Miami University of Ohio, University of Louisville, DePaul University, and others. The program has also helped students find success in the workforce, with jobs at the the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the U.S. Census Bureau, Freddie Mac, the Bank of Canada, and the Center for Naval Analysis. …

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The power of economics, said Greg Duffy ’15, is that the intangible becomes tangible. Duffy, who majored in economics and sang in an a capella group at Notre Dame, now uses that power to help connect artists with new audiences as a research analyst at the music-streaming service Pandora.

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Economics faculty members spend a considerable amount of their time engaged in research, so when we profile scholars such as Joe Kaboski or our new hires as we do in this newsletter, it is natural that we concentrate on their academic accomplishments. This newsletter also includes three stories about how our undergraduates are actively engaged in knowledge creation both while on campus and when they enter the workforce. Profiles of Claire O’Donnell ’16 and Danny Fitzgerald ’17 illustrate their research activities as undergraduates while another story introduces us to Greg Duffy ’15, now an employee at Pandora, who uses his economics training for research on a daily basis.

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César Sosa-Padilla, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the 2016 John Charles Polanyi Prize by the government of the Province of Ontario.

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“The liberal education I received at Notre Dame really taught me how to learn, how to analyze, and, at the most fundamental level, how to problem-solve,” said Bill Dirksen ’82. “And that’s what most businesses are looking for—people who know how to solve problems.”

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Notre Dame’s rapidly growing Department of Economics has added six new faculty members who bring diverse expertise in political economy, econometrics, labor mobility, market design, urban geography and poverty, and international finance. Lakshmi Iyer, Marinho Bertanha, Nilesh Fernando, Michèle Müller-Itten, David Phillips, and César Sosa-Padilla join the ranks of a vibrant department that has added more than a dozen faculty members in the last four years and offers one of the University’s largest undergraduate majors.

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Joseph Kaboski’s work in Armenia started with an email from the developing country, one of those you might usually delete. But the Notre Dame economist responded—and he’s now become a trusted adviser to the Central Bank of Armenia, helping with research to guide the Eurasian nation’s economic policy.

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The public has lots of questions about refugees, and William Evans and Danny Fitzgerald have come up with some answers. Evans, chair and Keough-Hesburgh Professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics, and Fitzgerald, a senior economics and mathematics major, have been analyzing a quarter-century of data to determine the economic impact of refugees who enter the United States. They will present their findings to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday (Nov. 15).

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The Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame conducts impactful research using the best available theoretical and empirical methods in the discipline, all while fostering the Catholic mission of the University. With specialties in macroeconomics, applied micro economics, development economics, and game theory, Notre Dame economics faculty and graduate students work together to find answers to a wide array of difficult economic, social, and policy-relevant questions. In this new video, Notre Dame economists talk about some of the department’s pioneering research projects and its approach to graduate education and faculty development. 

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The Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame conducts impactful research using the best available theoretical and empirical methods in the discipline, all while fostering the Catholic mission of the University. With specialties in macroeconomics, applied micro economics, development economics, and game theory, Notre Dame economics faculty and graduate students work together to find answers to a wide array of difficult economic, social, and policy-relevant questions.

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A study of the Homelessness Prevention Call Center in Chicago by the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities found that such hotlines have a considerable effect on people facing homelessness, and that emergency financial assistance successfully prevents homelessness — if funding is available. The study, published in the Aug. 12 edition of Science, examines the impact of financial assistance for 4,500 individuals and families who called the HPCC between 2010 and 2012.

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Claire O’Donnell has long been interested in researching education in developing countries, and her international economics major gave her the tools to do it. A 2016 Notre Dame graduate from Arlington Heights, Illinois, O’Donnell presented her senior thesis research this spring at the Undergraduate Research Paper Competition at the Midwest Economics Association’s annual conference. O’Donnell, who also completed a supplemental major in applied mathematics and a concentration in financial economics and econometrics, has accepted a position as a management consultant with PwC in Chicago.

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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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