The breadth of research conducted by members of the Department of Economics is currently on display at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute this week. [Read more…]
New Faces: Economics Welcomes Runjing Lu
The Department of Economics has appointed Runjing Lu to the role Assistant Professor of Financial Economics. Professor Lu joins the University of Toronto from the University of Alberta where she started her career after completing her PhD at the University of California, San Diego in 2020. Lu’s teaching experience concentrates on upper-year undergraduate courses in investment principles and financial accounting as well as financial economics.
Lu’s research interests span empirical finance, political economics, and social media. Her mostrecent studies focus on how political and social media sentiment affect markets and households. Results from one of the papers can be reviewed in the upcoming publication “The Social Signal” in the Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 158, to be released in August 2024. [Read more…]
New Faces: Economics Welcomes Michael Boutros
Michael Boutros joined the Department of Economics on 1 July 2024. The appointment is a homecoming for Assistant Professor Boutros who completed his undergraduate studies in Financial Economics at Innis College, University of Toronto. After convocation, he went on to complete his MA and PhD at Duke University. Boutros returns to UofT from the Bank of Canada where he served as a Senior Economist with the Financial Stability Department and the Economics and Financial Research Department during his three-year term. His research interests and publication history touch on a variety of aspects of household finance and macroeconomic policy. [Read more…]
New Faces: Economics Welcomes Jeffrey Sun
Jeffrey Sun, whose research focuses on the economic consequences of climate change, joined the Department of Economics on July 1, 2024. The new Assistant Professor recently completed his PhD at Princeton. His job market paper explored the implications of exposure to environmental events on the financial health of families whose assets are concentrated in their homes. During his assistantship in instruction, Sun gained experience in teaching introductory and intermediate macroeconomics, as well as undergraduate corporate finance.
“The University of Toronto has become an exciting place to do climate research. There is a huge department here with fantastic researchers studying all aspects of the economy,” Professor Sun said. “And many have become interested in applying those tools to pressing questions of how climate change will affect the specific slice of the economy that they understand well. You can almost see a new kind of structural climate economics taking shape here, and I could not be more excited to be a part of it.”
In Sun’s courses, future students can look forward to an instructional style rooted in purpose-driven learning communities. [Read more…]
New Faces: Economics Welcomes Mitsuru Igami
The Department of Economics is pleased to welcome newly appointed Associate Professor Mitsuru (Michi) Igami. Professor Igami comes to the University of Toronto from Yale where he has been since 2012. He has served terms as a visiting professor at Stanford, MIT, and UBC.
His reasons for choosing the University of Toronto are rooted in the opportunities available here.
“Because it is simply the best place on the planet to do my kind of research! Specifically, UofT has one of the most vibrant groups of Industrial Organization (IO) economists in the world, with emphasis on dynamic structural econometrics and the economics of innovation,” Igami said. “And then the city of Toronto is also among the best places to live, especially for an Asian family with a little kid.” [Read more…]