Congratulations to the Cowles 2023-2024 Arvid Anderson Fellows!
The Cowles Foundation is excited to announce and congratulate the 2023-24 recipients of the Arvid Anderson Prize Fellowship in Economics. The six graduate students are: Carlo Cusumano, Tianyu Fan, Daniel Graves, Jack Liang, Dana Scott, and Nick Wu.
The fellowship prize is awarded annually to pre-doctoral or post-doctoral students who are selected by a committee of Cowles professors in the Department of Economics with the approval of the Dean of the Graduate School. The award was established in 1982 by the award’s namesake, Carl Arvid Anderson—In Anderson’s own words, the fund is intended to “promote the development of more effective methods of inquiry in economics and the dissemination of information resulting from such studies.” Since its foundation, over 130 recipients have been awarded the fellowship. Read more about the fellowship here.
The cash prize also includes time off from academic duties for one semester, giving students time to concentrate on their research. Below are bios and fellowship plans for each of this year’s recipients.
Carlo Cusumano
(Fellowship: Fall 2023)
Carlo is a 5th year Economics PhD at Yale, with academic interests in economic theory (especially game theory), behavioral economics, and political economics.
With the time off from the fellowship, Carlo plans to work with his classmate, friend, and co-author Ferdinand Pieroth on a project about political checks and balances. The goal is to understand how institutional (e.g., judiciary system/ supreme court) and non-institutional (e.g., street protests) checks and balances work and interact with each other. Ultimately, their ambition is to provide a unified framework that can be used to analyze present-day political episodes across the world (say, Orban’s constitutional reforms in Hungary; Mass protests against the constitutional reform in Israel, etc.)
Tianyu Fan
(Fellowship: AY 2024-2025)
Tianyu studied economics at Peking University and completed a Masters in International and Development Economics at Yale. Before starting the Yale PhD program, Tianyu was a predoc supervised by Prof. Fabrizio Zilibotti. Previously, he worked with his two advisors, Fabrizio Zilibotti and Michael Peters, on "measuring service productivity growth and quantifying its unequal welfare consequences in India."
During the fellowship, Tianyu will mainly work on two projects: The first aims to measure inflation inequality in the US when perfect price data is unavailable, and the second explores the allocation of people when facing technological changes and the associated trade-off between inequality and economic growth.
Daniel Graves
(Fellowship: Spring 2024)
Daniel majored in math and economics as an undergraduate at Yale, and is currently a 5th year PhD student in the Department. He works primarily on behavioral finance and financial economics. He has co-authored a paper with Eduardo Dávila and Cecilia Parlatore, titled The Value of Arbitrage, which studies the social value of closing price differentials in financial markets.
During the fellowship, Daniel plans on applying recent advances in econometrics to study how attention fluctuations impact trading behavior and financial stability.
Jack Liang
(Fellowship: Spring 2024)
Jack is a fifth year PhD student from Rhode Island studying macroeconomics and trade, with a focus on firm growth and dynamics and spatial policies. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2017, and completed a predoc at Yale under Costas Arkolakis before beginning his PhD in 2019.
During the fellowship, Jack plans to work primarily on his job market paper studying the role of intangible capital in firm- and aggregate growth.
Dana Scott
(Fellowship: Spring 2024)
Dana Scott is a fourth-year student in the department specializing in labor economics. In her current work, she studies how amenities affect wage dispersion in the labor market using administrative matched employer-employee data and collective bargaining agreements in France. She plans to use the fellowship semester to travel to use these data sources.
Nick Wu
(Fellowship: Fall 2023)
Nick is a 4th year PhD student working on microeconomic theory, with research interests in mechanism design, information design, bandit problems, and learning. Prior to coming to Yale, he completed his undergraduate studies at MIT, double majoring in computer science and mathematics.
Nick will be using the fellowship time to research mechanism design and strategic experimentation games, with applications to incentivizing an agent using bounded rewards, designing sharing contracts, and regulating digital platforms.