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Everything Economics at the University of Toronto
The 2026 backpack2Briefcase (b2B): Economics at Work event was on 26 February. Graduating students attended to hear a panel of three alumni; Elisa Bozzo, Ritu Sharma, and Brett Lin talk about their experiences building careers after completing their degrees in economics. Professor Tyler Paul moderated the discussion and managed questions after.
On March 4th, 2026, the Department of Economics held its annual awards ceremony. The Undergraduate Awards of Excellence in Economics event celebrated the achievements of undergraduates during the 2024-2025 academic year. The 28 awards had a total value of $37, 195.69 this year. [Read more…]
There is stability in independence. That’s the central finding of Mariana Garcia Mejia’s article, Beyond the Border: Rethinking Canada’s Economic Future Without the US. The third-year University College student recently won one of two awards through the Department of Economics Essay Prize in Economic Policy.
“Canada must certainly avoid conflict with its closest partner, but it should simultaneously reimagine its trade landscape to achieve a more stable, independent future’ Mejia wrote.
The award, part of the essay competition associated with the Smith Family Scholarship, recognizes students whose essays stand out for the quality of writing and the application of economics to an important question in public policy. For Garcia Mejia, whose majors are economics and statistics with a minor in mathematics, the creation of the essay involved emphasizing skills outside her immediate comfort zone. [Read more…]
Madelyn Bardell doesn’t think working parents should be expected to provide childcare during their work hours. She compares the idea to expecting the same parents to build the road they travel on their daily commute. In an editorial-style paper entitled The Mirage of $10-a-Day Childcare: Affordability Without Access, Bardell outlines how the expansion of Quebec’s $10 per-day childcare plan into a federally-mandated universal childcare program remains, for many families, an illusion.
The third-year Victoria College student is pursuing both a Major in Economics and a Major in Ethics, Society and Law. It’s a pairing of programs that will give the Belleville native, who is considering law school as a next step, a healthy background in policy creation, as well as the research methodologies for testing and evidencing the efficacy of social programs that result from policy decisions. She has already started applying the critical lenses she is learning about to the world around her.
“I have a young niece and a niece and nephew, so I was just interested in the space,” Bardell explained. “I’d been seeing the $10‑a‑day headlines in the papers, but then I was hearing more anecdotally about problems with long waitlists. And when I started to look into that, there was just a lot of research available, so it seemed like a good space to get to know more about!” [Read more…]
The housing crisis is an affordability crisis. There is no relief from the high cost of rent, for example. Among those who can pull together a down payment, an average of 60% of their household income goes toward home ownership costs. The problem, believes undergraduate student Elliott Gale-Wagner, is that investors are holding on to land and passively benefitting from its appreciation. Citing diverse sources ranging from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz, Gale-Wagner used his article, A Tax-Based Solution to Canada’s Housing Crisis, to argue a Land Value Tax is central to resolving the crisis. The article won the Smith Family Scholarship for Economic Policy and was recognized at the Undergraduate Awards of Excellence in Economics ceremony on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. The article, Gale said, is meant to challenge how people view housing.
“When most people look at housing, they look at real estate listings and see a house, a bundle of characteristics, and a price,” Gale-Wagner explained. “Economists break that bundle into its parts so we can analyze which components are driving inequality or becoming disproportionately expensive. Using national balance sheet data from 1990 to 2023, I focused on the difference between land value and structure value. My conclusion is that our tax system is constructed incorrectly. We tax property instead of land, and that disincentivizes property improvements and contributes to the housing crisis.” [Read more…]