Alumni Research Profiles
Soren Anderson, Associate Professor, Department of Economics and Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University
Soren Anderson is a tenured Associate Professor. He joined MSU in 2008 and holds joint appointments in the Department of Economics and the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in economics from Macalester College. He studies a range of issues in energy and environmental economics, with a focus on markets for automobiles and the fuels they use, including oil, gasoline, and biofuels. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Journal of Industrial Economics. He teaches an undergraduate course on energy economics and a graduate course on environmental and resource economics, and he actively advises graduate students in both of his appointed departments. He is appointed as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he serves on the Editorial Board at the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He previously served as a visiting researcher at the Energy Institute at Haas at UC Berkeley, as a staff economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and as a research assistant at Resources for the Future.
Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Senior Research Economist, Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank
Andrew Goodman-Bacon is a senior research economist with the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. Prior to this role, he was an assistant professor in Vanderbilt University’s Department of Economics. He is also a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Development of the American Economy, Children, and Health Economics programs. Previously, Andrew was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew received a B.A. in economics and statistics from Macalester College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Michigan. His research focuses on policy issues related to labor, demography, health, and public economics. Of particular interest to Andrew are the effects of the policies created under the War on Poverty in the 1960s.
Andrew’s work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the New England Journal of Medicine. He also serves as an associate editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics.
Jon Einar Flatnes, Senior Researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute
Flåtnes is an applied development economist working on poverty, resilience, and climate adaptation among poor and vulnerable populations. His research to date has focused on understanding how innovative financial products, such as microfinance and insurance contracts, can help mitigate risk and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.
Some topics he has explored include social and conventional collateral in joint liability group lending, the effect of climate change on insurance demand, optimal design of index insurance contracts using remote sensing data, and complementarities between insurance and other technologies.
He has experience conducting field research, including large-scale interventions and lab-in-the-field experiments, and he has participated in projects taking place in Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, and China.
He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis in 2015 and previously worked as an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.
Eeshani Kandpal, Economist, Development Research Group
Eeshani Kandpal is an economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Her research focuses on the conceptualization and measurement of core welfare. Key areas of work include measuring and estimating the effects of peer networks on household decision making, quantifying the impact of conditional cash transfers on non-targeted households, exploring alternative bases of poverty thresholds in welfare space, as well as developing and applying locally tailored measures of female empowerment. Eeshani has a PhD and MS in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Economics and Classics from Macalester College, Minnesota. She was born and raised in India.
Alexandre Mas, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is a research fellow at Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also co-editor of American Economic Journals: Applied Economics, associate editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Economics, and serves on the International Advisory Committee of the British Journal of Industrial Relations. Professor Mas has held a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University, and has been a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section, since 2009.
From 2010 to 2011, Professor Mas served as the Associate Director for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 2009 to 2010. Previously he held appointments at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics of the University of California-Berkeley.
Professor Mas’ research has dealt with fairness considerations and norms in the labor market, social interactions, neighborhood segregation, the labor market effects of credit market disruptions, and unions.
He received the IZA Young Labor Economist Award and Princeton University’s Albert Rees Prize in 2009, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association’s John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award in 2008. He was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2009, and was a National Bureau of Economic Research Faculty Research Fellow from 2006 to 2009.
He received a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics from Macalester College in 1999, and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2004.
Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics at Yale University
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, a native of Bangladesh, is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, as co-chair of its Urban Services Initiative and of its Environment & Energy Sector work. He is also the academic lead for the Bangladesh Research Program for the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE, and Scientific Advisor to Innovations for Poverty Action, Bangladesh.
Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Malawi. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the implications of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, Wired.com, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
Mobarak is currently collaborating with Evidence Action in multiple countries to replicate, test, and scale his research program that encourages rural to urban seasonal migration to counter seasonal poverty. This program, called No Lean Season, is supported by GiveWell.org, Good Ventures and the Global Innovation Fund, and the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator.
Iryna Postolovska, Young Professional Program at the World Bank
Iryna Postolovska received doctorate (ScD) in the Health Systems major in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is currently in the Young Professional program at the World Bank. Her current research interests are most closely linked to the development and implementation of universal health coverage in order to ensure effective access to care for the poor. She is also interested in studying the behaviors of providers to better understand the governance structures and types of incentives that can be used to improve the outcomes of a health system in a fiscally sustainable manner. Iryna has previously worked at the World Bank on issues related to health financing in a number of countries, including Armenia, Kosovo, Oman, Tanzania, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. She has also conducted several capacity-building trainings for academic and government institutions. Most recently, Iryna co-led the Flagship Course on Health Systems Reform and Sustainable Financing in Kyiv, Ukraine. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Iryna received her bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies, with a minor in political science and a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism, from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
James M. Sallee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
James M. Sallee is a public economist who studies topics related to energy, the environment and taxation. Much of his work evaluates policies aimed at mitigating greenhouse gas emissions related to the use of automobiles.
He was the 2008 recipient of the National Tax Association Dissertation Award and the 2009 recipient of the John V. Krutilla Research Award. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan in 2008. He also holds a BA in economics and political science from Macalester College.
Emilia Simeonova, Professor of Economics, Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business, NBER Faculty Research Fellow
Emilia Simeonova joined Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in 2013 from Tufts University. Between 2011-2012 she was a research fellow at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. Emilia’s research interests in the economics of health care delivery, patient adherence to therapy and the interaction between physicians and patients, racial disparities in health outcomes, the long-term effects of shocks to children’s health and the intergenerational transmission of health. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the Danish Academy of Sciences.