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Wulandari Wins UTM June Scott Teaching Excellence Award for TAs

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Portrait of PhD Candidate Lara Wulandari
Lara Wulandari

Larasati (Lara) Wulandari, a fourth-year PhD student in development economics with the Department of Economics has won the UTM June Scott Teaching Excellence Award for Teaching Assistants. The award recognizes the contributions teaching assistants make towards the achievement of excellence in undergraduate education and to honour those who have made exceptional contributions to teaching. Award winners receive $2000 to put toward conference travel or professional development.

“This award really means a lot to me” Wulandari said. “Teaching has been one of the most rewarding parts of my time here at UofT, and it’s incredibly meaningful to know that students and instructors felt positively about our work together.”

Nominations for the award are supported by both faculty, who oversee teaching assistants in their courses, by staff, and by students who benefit from their work as tutorial leaders and marker/graders. [Read more…]

Build, Baby, Build: Benjamin Couillard’s Research Links Housing and Fertility

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Portrait of Benjamin Couillard, PhD Candidate in Economics
Benjamin Couillard, PhD Candidate Photo: A. Macedo

Build Baby Build is a provocative title for an economics paper. It also accurately describes the policy decision-makers should adopt to address the role housing affordability plays in falling fertility rates. The paper, subtitled How Housing Shapes Fertility, captures the research results of Benjamin K. Couillard, a PhD Candidate with the Department of Economics, who investigated the role of housing prices, location and family size using data from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey. In his analysis of the data, Couillard uses a structural model to understand the relationship between housing costs and fertility. Building on existing quasi-experimental work, his approach directly accounts for the differing trade-offs that large and small families make when choosing where to live, a phenomenon economists call sorting.

“Housing and fertility are jointly determined because large and small families sort into different locations based on the number of children they have – or want to have – and housing costs,” he said.

Couillard’s research is a matter of immediate concern. According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the fertility rate in the United States is 1.62 children per woman while the population replacement rate would be 2.1. [Read more…]

The Commuting Burden and Labour Market Power: Abdelrahman Amer Investigates the Role of Public Transit

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Portrait of PhD Candidate Abdelrahman Amer
Abdelrahman Amer, PhD Candidate Photo: A. Macedo

Would you rather earn less money and work closer to home, or travel a little farther to earn more money? As companies build warehouses and data centres farther from residential centres, worker preferences about what researchers call the commuting burden dictate not just the size of the labour market those companies draw workers from, but how much money those workers will expect to be paid for the extra trouble of getting to work. These issues are at the centre of labour economist Abdelrahman Amer’s research.

“The main idea is to understand how reducing workers’ commuting burden, primarily through transit infrastructure and an improved subway network, can help them access better firms,” explained the PhD Candidate at the Department of Economics. “It’s not just about accessing better firms; it’s also about having more options.” [Read more…]

New Faces 2025: Daphne Chen Instructional Support Assistant

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Portrait of Instructional Support Assistant Daphne Chen
Daphne Chen, Instructional Support Assistant

The Department of Economics is pleased to announce the appointment of Daphne Chen to the role of Instructional Support Assistant. Chen is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto at Scarborough with an MSc in Cell Systems Biology. A plant biologist, Chen brings a number of transferable skills to her tole that she developed as a teaching assistant and exam invigilator.

“I’m here primarily to the help the courses run smoothly, but also to help make the student learning experience as positive as possible,” she said. “I think that’s the best part of the job.”

Chen’s appointment took effect on 29 September 2025, and her focus will be assisting professors and teaching assistants in the delivery of undergraduate courses.

“In my time as a grad student here, I felt a great sense of community and its meaningful for me to continue to be part of UofT,” she said. “It’s a great place to be.” [Read more…]

Optimal Learning in the Face of Forgetting: Billur Gorgulu on How We Learn to Remember

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Portrait of PhD candidate Billur Gorgulu
Billur Gorgulu Photo: A.Macedo

While learning, people do retain some self-knowledge of how they remember, what they are likely to forget, and how they should reinforce what they have learned. That finding comes from research conducted by Billur Gorgulu, a PhD Candidate with the Department of Economics. A behavioural economist, Gorgulu studies how people make decisions and the factors that influence decision-making. Behavioural economics is differentiated from other branches of the discipline by the use of laboratory experiments to test theoretical models of how people will make choices given a particular situation or set of conditions.

[Read more…]

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