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Everything Economics at the University of Toronto
Graduate students at the Department of Economics have attracted the attention of external funding agencies and been awarded scholarships for the upcoming term.
If Toronto’s loyal hockey fans are looking for a winning team, they should start following the city’s economists. PhD candidate Guangbin Jeremy Hong, for example, may not do his best work on the ice, but he has now scored a hat trick with his job market paper.
The Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF) awarded Hong its Best Paper Award during a special session held at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Economic Association in Toronto on Friday, May 31. The paper, Two-Sided Sorting of Workers and Firms: Implications for Spatial Inequality and Welfare, also won both the Bank of Canada Graduate Student Paper Award, and the European Economic Association & UniCredit Foundation Best Job Market Paper Award. [Read more…]
Experience is usually a pre-requisite to achieving excellence. For Professor Nazanin Khazra, teaching excellence is more a matter of direct entry.
After just four years with the Department of Economics, the Assistant Professor has won the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award – Early Career for 2023-2024.
“I’m sure Professor Khazra’s students are not shocked by her winning this award at all,” said Thomas Byrne, a third year Math and Economics major at Innis College.
The award recognizes excellence in undergraduate and graduate education with a focus on classroom instruction, course design and curriculum development for early career faculty. [Read more…]
Professor Adonis Yatchew and his research team are at the core of a new collaboration between the Ontario Energy Board and the University of Toronto’s Climate Positive Energy (CPE) Initiative. The budget for the project is $250,000 with the final report due to the OEB this summer.
The collaboration will see Professor Yatchew and his research team conduct a review of benchmarking methodologies — comparisons used to gauge the performance of Ontario electricity distributors — and how the performance is used to regulate pricing, and other factors related to the electricity system. The review will also identify new benchmarking methodologies that consider the emerging challenges to electricity distribution brought about by the broader energy transition.
“As climate change initiatives are increasingly introduced into energy systems, there tends to be upward pressure on costs,” Yatchew said. “Efficient regulation that enhances incentives for cost control has to be part of the larger picture of decarbonization efforts.” [Read more…]
“When young people are thinking about their careers and businesses they should focus on learning to analyze and solve problems,” said alumnus Robert C. Douglas. “Become a problem-solver.”
Douglas’ advice to current students comes after a long and successful career in public service, the foundations of which he built here at the University of Toronto.
“I’ve always thought highly of the Department of Economics. I was fortunate to work at the Institute for Quantitative Analysis (at 150 St. George) for a summer after graduation and have been very pleased to meet and thank several of my professors over the years,” Douglas explained. [Read more…]