Johanna Torres Chain is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, household finance, and public policy, with particular emphasis on Social Security and savings. She studies how informal and spousal caregiving shape households’ saving behavior and demand for formal care, with attention to differences across racial, gender, and ethnic groups.
Francisco Bullano is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Minnesota. His research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, public economics, and health, with a focus on health insurance markets. He studies how Medicaid expansions for children and pregnant women have influenced household insurance decisions, reshaped private coverage, and contributed to long-run trends in access to care. His work highlights how policies directed at specific family members can spill over to affect entire households.
Abdoulaye Ndiaye is an Assistant Professor of Economics at New York University, Stern School of Business. He conducts research in macroeconomics, public finance, development, and political economy.
Xincheng Qiu in an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, in May 2023.
J. Carter Braxton is an assistant professor in economics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Carter completed his PhD in economics at the University of Minnesota, and has an undergraduate degree in economics from Davidson College. His research interests are in macroeconomics, labor economics, and consumer finance.
Zhixiu Yu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, E. J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University. Yu was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a visiting research fellow at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School during 2022-2023.
Diego Daruich is a macroeconomist (broadly defined), with particular interests in human capital accumulation and early childhood development. He is currently on the job market as a Ph.D. candidate from New York University. Diego's job market paper studies the consequences of a large-scale and long-run government program that invests in early childhood development.
Youngmin Park is a Senior Economist at the Bank of Canada. He is interested in identifying potential inefficiencies associated with differential human capital investment across families and designing policies to mitigate them. He is also interested in understanding market forces that shift returns to acquired human capital and change wage inequality over time.
Park received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 2016.
Kyle Herkenhoff is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2014, and his research, which focuses on the interaction of labor markets and consumer credit markets, places equal weight on theory and empirics.
Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln is professor for Macroeconomics and Development at Goethe University Frankfurt. Prior to joining the faculty of Goethe University in 2009, she was an assistant professor at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the analysis of household saving and labor supply behavior, labor market integration, and the endogeneity of preferences. She has published among others in the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry of Finance.
