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Everything Economics at the University of Toronto
The Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program (OGS) is a merit-based award open to graduate students of all disciplines. The province provides 2/3s the award funds while universities provide the remainder. The scholarships are in the amount of $10,000 for two consecutive terms, or $15,000 for three. After a rigorous application and ranking process, twelve PhD students of the Department of Economics have been awarded the OGS this year. [Read more…]
Irisa Zhou is one of the winners of the inaugural Rising Star Award for her job market paper Skill Mismatches and Earnings Inequality Among College Graduates. Her paper examines why there is such differentiation in earnings among college graduates with the same major, despite having similar skills.
A PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, Zhou specializes in labour and macroeconomics issues. Her research uses quantitative macroeconomic methods and causal inference using tools like MATLAB and Python. [Read more…]
The team was the result of one dinner at 7PM that became a habit. Making the finals of the National Case Competition was the second result of that habit. The most important result is the remarkable friendship created by three economics undergrads affiliated with Trinity College. Aditi Gupta, Natalia George, and Diya Chandna are all international students from India who chose to study at the University of Toronto.
“Natalia and I became friends in our first-year economics class,” Diya remembered. “I just asked her what college she was from, and when she said Trinity, I invited her to dinner. That small moment turned into a tradition. We ate dinner together every night at seven for two years.”
Aditi joined their table after learning her childhood friend was in Toronto too. [Read more…]
Lawrence Hsu is a champion of interdisciplinary research. That’s why the second year PhD student of economics chose to present his work at a biotechnology conference. It’s also how he won the best poster award while he was there. Across disciplines, research posters are important tools in the dissemination of study results at academic conferences. They provide a complete and accessible visual overview of the project to attract attention and inspire discussion among attendees. Hsu’s work in health economics focuses on the pharmaceutical industry, which was a good fit for the Boston Taiwanese Biotechnology Association’s (BTBA) annual symposium held at Harvard earlier this July.
“Fundamentally, I aim to observe industrial responses to achieve a more accurate structure that describes the correlation between revenue loss and R&D in drug development,” Hsu explained.
Do electric vehicle tax incentives result in lower carbon emissions or employment stability in the auto sector? How can the transition to clean, sustainable energy be best managed? How can governments best direct their resources to enforcing anti-deforestation laws? These are just some of the research questions economics researchers at the University of Toronto are exploring as urgent global attention focuses on climate change.
Starting in their first year, undergraduate students enrolled in ECO199 can start exploring the trade offs between economic development and environmental degradation at the local level, as seen through soil degradation and deforestation, and at the global level through climate change, and examine the policies meant to address them. More senior undergraduates can access ECO313, Environmental Economics and Policies, and ECO314, Energy and the Environment, where they learn to incorporate aspects of climate economics, energy economics, urban economics, behavioural economics and other areas of the field into their work. [Read more…]