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Everything Economics at the University of Toronto

New Faces: Economics Welcomes Runjing Lu

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Portrait of Runjing Lu
Assistant Professor 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…]

Monitoring the Greenbelt’s Efficacy: Keyi Fan at CEA2024

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Portrait of Keyi Fan
Keyi Fan, Class of 2024

Is Ontario’s greenbelt having an impact on surface water pollution and environmental conservation? It is a question Keyi Fan has dedicated the past year of her life investigating and, her last days as an undergraduate student, discussing with the country’s economists. A finalist in the Bank of Canada’s Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award, Keyi presented her findings at Canadian Economics Association’s annual meeting at the end of May. The new Woodsworth College alumna graduated two and a half weeks later with a Specialist in Economics and Major in Peace, Conflict and Justice.

Keyi’s study investigates the impact of the Greenbelt as a major land-use planning policy for its impact on surface water quality in Southern Ontario. Her approach uses a dataset that combines high resolution water quality monitoring data with detailed information on water course characteristics and census boundaries. Keyi then estimated the causal effect of the Greenbelt on key pollutants, including biological oxygen demand (BOD), chromium, lead, and cadmium levels. [Read more…]

New Faces: Economics Welcomes Michael Boutros

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Portrait of Michael Boutros
Assistant Professor 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

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Portrait of Jeffrey Sun
Assistant Professor 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

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Portrait of Associate Professor Michi Igami
Associate Professor Michi 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…]

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