Ettore Damiano comments on developments in the Department of Economics
My first complete year as department chair has been an eventful one. Recruiting was in full swing, with a record six searches across the St George and Mississauga campuses. After a very successful hiring season, we have many new faces to welcome to our community as we start a new academic year: Mons Chan, a Minnesota graduate working in industrial organization; Anne-Katrin Roesler, a microeconomic theorist and Bonn graduate; Anton Tsoy, a financial economist and MIT graduate; two labour economists – Carolina Arteaga from UCLA and Clementine van Effenterre from the Paris School of Economics; and Nathanael Vellekoop, a graduate of Tilburg University working in macro and financial economics. They bring new energy and ideas to our large and vibrant group of young scholars.
It has been another strong year of accomplishments for our students and faculty. To mention a few examples, two of our junior faculty, Jiaying Gu and Ismael Mourifié, won the Polanyi Prize in Economics and the Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize respectively. Senior faculty were equally successful and both recipients of this year’s Bank of Canada Fellowship Award are members of our department: Michelle Alexopoulos and Diego Restuccia join an exclusive group of fourteen exceptional scholars who have received this prestigious award since it was established by the Bank of Canada in 2003.
A sad note for the year was the sudden passing in November of Arthur Hosios. As a professor, department chair, and Dean’s advisor, Arthur left an indelible mark on our department and the University of Toronto overall. An event in his memory held in the spring brought together faculty, students, staff and Arthur’s family to celebrate his exceptional life accomplishments. A successful fundraising campaign was also started in Arthur’s honour, raising in excess of $100,000 of endowment for the Arthur Hosios Scholarship in Economics. We are looking forward to congratulating the first recipient of this new undergraduate scholarship this fall.
The newsletter offers an excellent overview of the many other things our faculty, students and staff have accomplished over the last year or so. I hope you will take the time to read through it, to learn about the achievements of our faculty and students, and to keep informed of changes in the department. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to thank staff and faculty for their collegiality and support over the past 12 months – I am looking forward to working with everyone in the department over the next academic year.
