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New Faces 2025: Assistant Professor Dan McGee

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Portrait of Assistant Professor of Economics Dan McGee
Dan McGee, Assistant Professor of Economics

Dan McGee joined the Department of Economics on 1 July 2025. The department welcomes the new assistant professor fresh from a post-doctoral position at Monash University in Australia. A recent Princeton graduate, Professor McGee has diverse research interests that span behavioural economics, economic theory, political economy, and economic history. His initial appointment is for three years.

“I am particularly interested in questions around discrimination, stereotyping, and ideology,” MeGee said. “In recent work, I studied implicit bias, arguing that implicit bias emerges from bounded rationality and imperfect memory, and in some ongoing projects, I’m expanding a theory of strategic discrimination to understand the processes through which discriminatory behaviour can create advantages for certain individuals at others’ expense, and I’m exploring the origins of beliefs in and preferences for or against hierarchical social arrangements as a foundation for political ideology.”

McGee was drawn to the University of Toronto by the diversity of research conducted by members of the Department of Economics and its strong reputation. [Read more…]

Not Noise: UofT Researcher Runjing Lu Examines Market Signals from Social Media

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Portrait of Assistant Professor of Financial Economics Runjing Lu.
Assistant Professor Runjing Lu Photo: A. Macedo

When it comes to predicting market behaviour, social media is more than just noise. After analyzing millions of investor posts, Assistant Professor Runjing Lu of the Department of Economics and her co-authors have shown that social media can yield valuable signals for understanding financial markets. The key to unlocking these signals means distinguishing between how investors feel, or their sentiment, and what investors choose to focus on, or their attention.

The study, Market Signals from Social Media, examined millions of daily posts made on three different social media platforms between 2013 and 2021.

“We constructed indexes using data from StockTwits, Twitter, and Seeking Alpha, platforms where investors actively post,” Professor Lu explained. “What’s unique is that we separate sentiment from attention. On these platforms, users express both their opinions about how bearish or bullish they are about a stock, which gives us sentiment, and their focus of discussion, the stocks they talk about, which gives us attention. We then aggregated these signals across firms and platforms to create separate daily indexes for sentiment and attention that reflect overall market mood and focus.” [Read more…]

Development Economics & the Development of Economics at UTM: In Memory of Professor Emeritus Michael Hare

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Portrait of the late Professor Emeritus Michael Hare.
Professor Hare was one of UofT’s longest-serving faculty members. Photo: Frances Juriansz, UofT archives.

On 4 June 2025, Professor Emeritus of Economics Michael Hare died. He was 92. A developmental economist who retired from the department in 1999, he continued to teach until 2013 when he reached the age of 80 and celebrated 50 years of teaching. Hare was instrumental in the development of several courses that are still taught across the tri-campus, including ECO105 for non-specialists, which is the only economics course many students take in their undergraduate studies.

“What I remember most about Mike Hare was his deep and unwavering commitment to students – especially in ECO 100. When I was a new student here in 1980, several of my Commerce friends were in his section. They raved about him—not because he was easy (he wasn’t), but because he was clear, demanding, and cared deeply about helping students learn,” said Professor Dwayne Benjamin, Vice Provost of Strategic Enrolment Management. “He was rightly proud of his role in shaping that foundational course, and even more proud of the generations of students who came through it. Teaching wasn’t just his profession; it was clearly his calling. In fact, it was hard to imagine him ever leaving the classroom – his dedication ran that deep.” [Read more…]

Goodbye and Welcome Back: Advice from New Grad Victor Popa Burca

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Picture of Victor Popa Burca and Professor Damiano
Victor Popa Burca and Professor Damiano, Chair of the Department of Economics at the 2024-25 Undergraduate Awards of Excellence. Burca won both the Paul L. Nathanson Scholarship in Economics and the The Safarian Scholarship in Economics this year. Photos: A. Macedo

On the St. George campus, it’s rare for an undergraduate to hold a teaching assistant position. According to Professor of Economics Marcin Pęski the TA co-ordinator for the Department of Economics, only 12% of TA hours are completed by undergrads. That number is much larger at the UTM campus where tutorials are typically run by undergraduates.

New graduate Victor Popa Burca was one of those rare undergraduate TAs for Professor Joseph Steinberg’s course Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory.

“I was TAing ECO208 when I was in third year,” said the Innis College student whose convocation is next week. “I felt like I connected more closely to the students because I had taken the course just the year before. I brought a student’s approach to the course. I was like, ‘Guys, I was just where you are now. I’m here to help you. If I could do this, you can do it.’ I feel that people were more comfortable with me than with a sensei-type teaching assistant, you know?”

Burca gave students in his Macroeconomic Theory tutorial three key pieces of advice:

[Read more…]

Equity, Fairness and Causality: Yunfei (Kevin) Wang’s Research Passions

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Portrait of Kevin Wang
Kevin Wang, Economics class of 2025

Issues of equity and fairness are prominent in the intellectually vast discipline of economics. These issues inspired Yunfei (Kevin) Wang in pursuit of his degree. After convocation, the Vancouverite will be taking his interests and training with him for a pre-doc research position at Stanford University in California.

“I didn’t come into U of T with a clear idea of what I wanted to research,” Kevin remembered. “But over time, as I got more exposure to real-world issues—through the news, podcasts like Planet Money, and my coursework—I started gravitating toward questions about inequality, fairness, and policy. That’s what led me to economics, and eventually to combining it with math and computer science. Now, I’m especially interested in how we can use data and rigorous methods to answer complex social questions.” [Read more…]

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