It’s been a year of changes to how the federal government funds graduate student research. There has been consistency, however, in recognizing PhD students with the Department of Economics and their work. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has awarded new funding to four PhD students in the Department of Economics. Unusually, three of the awards were retroactive and funds backdated to September 2024.
“Occasionally, but not every year, we have one retroactive award but never had so many, so late in the year,” said Sara Solis, Graduate Program Administrator. “It was a nice surprise for everyone involved!”
Taryn Eames was awarded funding for both 2024-25 and 2025-26. An applied microeconomist, Eames is interested in labour economics, education economics, and the economics of discrimination. In a recent working paper, she quantified employer discrimination against job applicants who include non-binary pronouns on their resumes.
“My work examines unequal labour market outcomes for gender diverse populations,” she explained. “I am using SSHRC funding to conduct a field experiment using A.I.-generated images to identify hiring discrimination against transgender women and to investigate the extent to which gender identity versus gender presentation influences bias.”
Mahmood Haddara’s research in the broad fields of macroeconomics and industrial organization has been awarded funding for both 2024-25 and 2025-26. Haddara, whose job market candidacy begins in September, is also a past winner of a Canadian Research Data Centre Network Emerging Scholars Award.
“My research explores the impact of business creation on the macroeconomy. I am currently studying how customer accumulation frictions slow the growth of new firms, entrenching market leaders and lowering aggregate productivity,” Haddara said. “The SSHRC fellowship allows me to devote more of my time to research, which is extremely helpful at this stage of the program.”
Sobia Jafry was retroactively awarded SSHRC funding for 2024-25. The scholar, who works in public finance and household finance topics, is also a recipient of the OGS for 2025-26, her job market year.
“I am honoured to receive this scholarship. To me, it signifies recognition of the importance of my research on the economic implications of tax policy choices,” Jafry said. “These decisions influence not only individual lives but also our society as a whole, shaping patterns of inequality and opportunity. This award has strengthened my commitment to advancing this work.”
Adrian Schroeder received a new award starting in September 2025. Schroeder’s research is in the broad areas of nonlinear and dynamic panels, structural econometrics, and multivariate time-series. In a recent publication, he and his co-authors examined how an awareness of economic unfairness can prompt people to expect unethical behaviour from others.
“I’m humbled to having received a SSHRC award for the next two years, which enables me to spend more time and computational resources on my research in econometric theory,” Schroeder explained. “Similarly to the OGS I previously won, I take it as a signal that my research helps economists on the ground making better policy decisions, where I aim at expanding limited information panel and structural models from economics via probability theory to refine our understanding of what makes economic agents tick.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
Scroll more news.