UW Economics Professor Pat Bajari has been elected as a board member of the Western Economic Association. The Western Economics Association is a non-profit academic society dedicated to the encouragement and dissemination of economic research and analysis. It publishes two quarterly journals: Economic Inquiry and Contemporary Economic Policy.
Recently, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath released a press conference on the latest outlook for the global economy given the current COVID-19 pandemic. Gopinath was appointed Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the fall of 2018.
She received her Masters of Economics in 1996 before transferring to Princeton University to complete her PhD, Gopinath was chosen as the department’s Distinguished Alumna in 2017. She is currently on leave from Harvard University where she is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics.
Our 2020 Distinguished Alumnus Ramanan Laxminarayan is the founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP). Laxminarayan and his team have been working tirelessly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and have produced evidence based recommendations for the public, both in India and globally, which can be viewed here. In late March, the Princeton University Bendheim Center for Finance produced a webinar, which featured Laxminarayan. You can view the recorded webinar, entitled “Ramanan Laxminarayan on integrating economics and epidemiology to fight COVID-19” here.
Laxminarayan received his PhD in Economics from our department in 1999. In the same year, Laxminarayan completed a concurrent Master’s degree in Public Health from the UW Department of Epidemiology. He is as a senior research scholar and lecturer at the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University and an affiliate professor at the UW department of Global Health.
Associate Professor D. Mark Anderson, of Montana State University, was recently appointed co-editor of the Economic Inquiry. Anderson is an alumnus of our department, having received his PhD in Economics in 2011. Anderson also has a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy, “The Effect of Occupational Licensing on Consumer Welfare: Early Midwifery Laws and Maternal Mortality,” with Ryan Brown, Kerwin Charles, and Daniel Rees. This peer reviewed journal is widely seen as one of the more prestigious journals in economics.