Greg Kaplan is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His research spans macroeconomics, labor economics, and applied microeconomics, with a focus on the distributional consequences of economic policies and economic forces. He has published extensively on the topics of inequality, risk sharing, unemployment, household formation, migration, fiscal policy, and monetary policy. Kaplan is an editor at the Journal of Political Economy, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He also is an economic consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In 2015, he received a Sloan Foundation fellowship, and in 2019, he was awarded the Central Banking Prize for Economics in Central Banking for his paper, “Monetary Policy According to HANK,” jointly with Ben Moll and Gianluca Violante. Kaplan earned his Ph.D. in economics from New York University, his M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics, and his B.Com in finance from Macquarie University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Benjamin Scuderi
Benjamin Scuderi is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on labor economics, the economics of the criminal legal system, and applied econometrics. His ongoing research examines the effects of policies aimed at encouraging work in imperfectly competitive labor markets. In other projects, he explores the estimation of heterogeneous worker preferences over firms from unique data on worker choices, the consequences of dispersion in skills among court-appointed attorneys for indigent clients, and the distribution of discriminatory jury selection behavior by prosecutors. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a predoctoral fellow at the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at Harvard University. He graduated with a B.A. in applied mathematics from Harvard University, where he was awarded the Thomas Temple Hoopes prize for his senior thesis.
Lina Yu
Lina Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Georgetown University. Her research interests are monetary policy and firm dynamics. She is working on identifying the heterogenous employment responses by different firm groups to monetary policy shocks. Motivated by her empirical findings, she is evaluating the role of housing prices and its effect on the observed heterogeneous responses. Her research utilizes both macro and micro data for the empirical analysis and a monetary business cycle model for counterfactual policy analysis. Yu received her B.A. in Hindi and economics from Peking University and her M.A. in international relations and international economics from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Georgetown University, Yu worked as a research assistant at the International Monetary Fund.
Eva Lyubich
Eva Lyubich is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a graduate student researcher at the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Her research is on energy and climate policy, with a focus on the relationship between inequality, public goods, and emissions. She is especially interested in the potential role of place-based policy in addressing the climate crisis. Prior to starting her graduate studies, she worked as a research assistant at Microsoft Research. She received an B.S. in physics from Brown University.
Lena Song
Lena Song is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at New York University. Her research examines the effect of technological change and innovation on firm performance, consumer welfare, and inequality. Her dissertation studies the emergence of Black-focused radio stations and discrimination in the media market in the United States. She received her B.Math. from the University of Waterloo, her B.B.A. from Wilfrid Laurier University, and her M.Phil. from the University of Oxford.
Pedro Juarros
Pedro Juarros is an economist at the International Monetary Fund. He received is Ph.D. in economics from Georgetown University. His research focuses on the impact of the firm size distribution and firms’ borrowing constraints on the transmission mechanism of fiscal stimulus in the United States. He also studies the heterogeneous impact of social spending on output across developed and developing countries, and how local fiscal stimulus can boost innovation across cities in the United States. He is most interested in both the short-run and long-run effects of aggregate demand shocks on economic activity. Juarros earned his B.A. in economics from Universidad Nacional de La Plata and his M.A. in economics from Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. Before beginning doctoral studies at Georgetown, he worked as a research assistant in the Research Department of the World Bank.
Daniel Valderrama
Daniel Valderrama is an economist consultant at the World Bank. He was previously a junior professional associate in the Poverty Global Practice at the World Bank. His research interests are focused on the intersection of political economy and public economics. Valderrama holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Georgetown University, as well as a Master of economics from the Universidad del Rosario and a Bachelor of economics from the Universidad de Antioquia.
Janet Xu
Janet Xu is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Inequality in America Initiative. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University, where she was also affiliated with the Office of Population Research. Her research interests include economic sociology and organizations, race/ethnicity, inequality, and public opinion.
Derek Wu
Derek Wu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests lie in labor and public economics, focusing on poverty and inequality, the effects of government programs, and the economics of education. His current research assesses how administrative burdens affect the take-up and targeting of welfare programs, as well as the short- and long-run effects of welfare cuts on economic well-being. Prior to graduate school, Wu worked at Ithaka S+R and the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and he has served as a member of the Maryland State Board of Education. He received a B.A. in public and international affairs from Princeton University.
Glen Kwende
Glen Kwende is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at American University. His research interests are in macroeconomics, labor economics, and development economics. Kwende’s dissertation focuses on labor search and matching models, investigating the microfoundations for wage rigidity in these models. His research also looks at workers’ bargaining power in these models, providing a pathway to estimating a time series of bargaining power in the United States in the context of these models. He earned his B.S. degrees in finance and economics and a M.S. in economics at the University of Wyoming.