Newsletter - April 2024

Economics Department

Welcome to our new issue of the newsletter!
Summer is approaching and it's time to celebrate our graduate and undergraduate students!


You can follow us on Twitter @UofA_Econ and LinkedIn.

Undergraduate Students

• Governor's Challenge Competition

  The University of Alberta team participated in the 2023/24 Governor's Challenge competition organized by the Bank of Canada. The team included five students from the university's undergraduate Economics program: Danny Lu, Anh Nguyen, Faiza Noor, Hansen Shu, and Amritpal Singh. They were coached by Malik Shukayev and Max Sties, faculty members from the Department of Economics.
  
  The Governor's Challenge is a prestigious annual competition, where about 20 teams of undergraduate students from Canadian universities compete. The competition has been running for the past nine years, and our department has participated in all of them starting from the second one. The University of Alberta team was the finalist six times in this prestigious competition, achieving the National Champion twice in 2021 and 2023.
  
  Furthermore, the Bank of Canada hired eight of our undergraduate students who participated in the Governor's Challenge, with four of them still currently employed.
  
  The continued success of the University of Alberta in the Governor's Challenge is a source of pride for the institution and a reflection of the excellence of its Economics program.
  Keep up the great work!
  

  Our team with the Bank of Canada Governor, Tiff Macklem

• Students Launch an Economics Journal

  The Economics Student Inquiry (ESI) is an open-access online journal of the University of Alberta Economics Students' Association (ESA). ESI aims to provide undergraduate and graduate students with a platform to publish their research papers, course projects, case studies, term papers, and research assignments. Publications in ESI will be accessible to a broader audience and help students showcase their research skills.
  
  For more information about the journal, see here

• Placement Highlights

  • Jackson Reid, who is entering his fourth Honors year, recently secured an internship with ATB Financial in the Credit Risk Modelling and Data Science team. He will be working to develop new methodologies for the bank's credit risk models over the summer. This is his second summer interning at ATB.
  • Mark Kim, one of our graduating Honors student, has secured a research assistant position at the Bank of Canada, with the Canadian Economic Analysis department. Following this opportunity, Mark intends to pursue advanced degrees at graduate school.
  • Danny Lu, a graduating Honors Economics student, has been accepted into the Master's in Economics program at the University of British Columbia . Congratulations, Danny!
  • Jude Barros has been accepted into the Master of Arts in Economics program at Queen's University. Jude recently graduated with a double major in Math and Economics with a minor in Spanish. In addition to his academic achievements, he is currently serving as Lead Due Diligence Analyst for the University of Alberta Innovation Fund. Jude is also a Research Analyst for the Government of Alberta's Provincial Bargaining and Compensation Office.

• Undergraduate Students Excel in PRMIA Competition.

  Three undergraduate students, Siqing Sun, Yaxin Wang, and Yitong Wang, have qualified for the national round of the prestigious Professional Risk Managers' International Association (PRMIA) competition. Under the guidance of Dr. Aslan Benhamian and Dr. Valentina Galvani, the students demonstrated their exceptional analytical skills by tackling a case study on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse.

Graduate Students - Highlights

• New Course in Data Analysis

  Dr. Sebastian Fossati's new course in data analysis has offered our M.A. students the unique opportunity of working on an applied research project with real-world data.
  
  The course culminated in a series of short presentations attended by senior bank managers and former graduate students who are now in managerial positions. This has provided students with an opportunity to showcase their work and gain valuable feedback from professionals in the field.
  

  Dr. Sebastian Fossati

Highlights

• Five of our graduate students (Diyorbek Siddikov, Harmon Tamura, Xiaoran Shi, Xiao Lu, and Mona Sarhadi) had the opportunity to intern with a local financial institution. They were working on projects related to credit risk. We thank Dr. Sebastian Fossati and Dr. Valentina Galvani for their efforts in securing funding and supervising projects.
• Congratulations to Boris Moreno Ortega on successfully defending his thesis in 2023. We wish Boris all the best in his postdoctoral appointment at the University of Luxembourg.
• In March 2023, three of our PhD students shared their research at a Joint Symposium on Chinese Economy and Society, hosted by the Departments of Economics and East Asian Studies.
• In June 2023, five of our PhD students shared their research in a Policy Pints event hosted by the Economics Society of Northern Alberta at the Rocky Mountain Ice House. We look forward to the 6th annual event in June, 2024.
• In December, PhD student Kyle Phong took home the graduate student trophy at the inaugural Labour Economics Battle of Alberta, sponsored by the Department of Economics, the Institute for Public Economics, and WELM-Arts.

Alumni

• Robin Shaban named associate partner at Deetken Insight

  Robin Shaban, an Honours graduate of our undergraduate program in Economics, has been named associate partner at Deetken Insight consulting. Robin will lead Deetken's operations in Ontario.
  
  In 2021, Robin was a recipient of The Globe and Mail's Changemaker Award for their efforts to advance public policy centered on social justice and their academic work on competition policy. Robin is also co-founder of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, a think tank that addresses pressing issues caused by monopoly power in Canada.
  

  Robin Shaban

Students Awards of the Year

Each year, the Department of Economics honors the exceptional accomplishments of its students through a series of awards.
These awards include monetary prizes to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the recipients.

Undergraduate Level

• The Emerson and Tang Family Scholarship - Sara Abou-Alwan
• The Archibald Forster McGoun Memorial Scholarship in Economics - Diya Arora
• A H Earl Joudrie Scholarship - Jarod Chiasson
• An Angus Sinclair Abell Memorial Scholarship in Economics - Jarod Chiasson
• The Economics Society of Northern Alberta Scholarship - Jack Mossey
• The Balder von Hohenbalken Memorial Prize in Economics - Peter Sabotilov
• the Ray Protti Scholarship in Economics - Hansen Shu
• The Dr Milton F Bauer Memorial Scholarship - Tony Yuen
• The Duncan Alexander MacGibbon Medal in Economics - Kayla Layden
• The Dr Manmohan Singh Prize in Economics - Jarod Chiasson

Graduate Level

• Economics Society of Northern Alberta MA Scholarship in Economics - Shiteng Xu
• Core Prize in Economics - Guanyu Liu
• University of Alberta Graduate Recruitment Scholarship - Kalam Azad, Xiaoran Shi
• Maurice, Mary and Max Stewart Graduate Scholarship in Economics - Wenxuan Zhao
• Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship - Xuan Cui, Fang Li
• University of Alberta Graduate Entrance Scholarship - Olivia Li

Faculty

• Andrew Leach's Interview About His New Book on Climate Change

  Andrew Leach continues to be a leading voice on climate change policy in Canada. He has been presenting his new book in an interview on YouTube, where he summarizes his main findings.
  
  

  Andrew Leach

• Dave Brown has obtained a grant from Stanford University

  Dave Brown has obtained $475,000 in funding over two years as a co-PI. The grant is funded by the Stanford Impact Labs, which considers projects focused on outreach to regulators and policymakers. The project is titled "Building a Coalition for Improved Resource Adequacy Policy in a High-Renewables West". The goal of the project is to work with regulators in Western North American jurisdictions to more effectively design electricity markets with a high penetration of renewables. This will be done through a workshop series where we travel to regulatory agencies and hold educational workshops, as well as write academic articles on the topic.

• Dave Brown's Feature Article in NBER digest

  Dave Brown's NBER working paper was the feature article in the January 2024 NBER digest that selects a handful of policy-relevant articles published in the NBER working paper series each month. This is one of the many EV-related papers that Dave has been working on. Moreover, he has presented his latest paper at the UC Berkeley POWER conference last month.
  

  Dave Brown

• Teaching Award for Max Sties

  Max Sties, has been selected as a recipient of the 2024 Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award – Early Achievement. The prize is given by the Arts Teaching Awards Committee, which is composed of both faculty and students. Congratulations to him!

• Rick Szostak Still Active!

  Rick Szostak is easing into retirement by accepting speaking engagements around the world.
  
  On Leap Day, he presented "Economics as social science" to the Economics Department of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and "Economics and Interdisciplinarity" to the Workshop on History and Methodology of Economics at the same university. In March, he made two conference presentations on Knowledge Organization in Wuhan, China. In May, he has a keynote presentation at a conference sponsored by the European Union in Belgium on evidence-based policy analysis. In July, he gives a presentation at the University of Salento in Lecce, Italy. And, in November, he is organizing and chairing a plenary panel for an international conference on interdisciplinarity in Utrecht, Netherlands. He will also make presentations to the Netherlands network for interdisciplinarity and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Utrecht University. And, yes, he has added vacation time to each trip!
  

  Rick Szostak

Institute for Public Economics (IPE)

• Established in 1997, the IPE entered its twenty-seventh year under the co-directorship of Professors Andrew Leach and Joseph Marchand.
  
  In March 2023, Andrew and Joseph shared their vision for the IPE with the Faculty of Arts, and they began their five-year term in July 2023. Since then, the IPE co-hosted a book launch (Andrew’s) in the Faculty of Law and co-sponsored a labour session at the annual ESNA economic outlook conference at the World Trade Centre in downtown Edmonton, both in November 2023.
  
  The IPE then co-sponsored a labour economics workshop (Joseph’s) in the Tory Building in December and co-hosted the thirteenth annual Alberta budget post-mortem in the Tory Turtle this March 2024.
  
  This all leads up to the Eric J. Hanson memorial lecture series this April 2024, which will feature the outgoing Chief Statistician of Canada, Anil Arora, as its speaker.
  

  Joseph Marchand

  

  Andrew Leach