Meet The Five PhD's Awarded 2026-27 Anderson Fellowships

Five research projects from Yale PhD's—spanning from electric vehicle infrastructure to 1920's Soviet economics—will receive a boost in funding thanks to the Cowles Foundation's Arvid Anderson Prize Fellowship in Economics.

Each year, a committee of professors in the Economics department at Yale selects the students who will receive the cash prize and time off from academic duties for one semester. The award was established by Carl Arvid Anderson, a Yale alumnus who established the prize in 1978.

Each recipient comes from a different subfield in economics. Read more detail below on the projects and the student interests behind them:

Liza Brover - "I work in economic history with a regional focus on the Soviet Union under the supervision of Drs. Leah Boustan and Jose Espin-Sanchez. I have been interested in this setting and time period since my childhood, growing up in a post-Soviet immigrant household. During my first year at Yale, I found several primary sources in US archives that offer insights into the economic lives of Soviet individuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of my upcoming academic year will be spent completing the digitization of one of these sources, the 1922 and 1926 CPSU censuses (n~900,000). These data will be used to study how local administration enforced the Soviet industrialization and collectivization programs. Several individual and collaborative projects with these data will offer new insight on how the Soviet state was able to develop so rapidly yet asymmetrically across time and space."

 Luis Hoderlein - "My research focuses primarily on analyzing failure modes in econometric work and developing suitable workarounds. For example, using the extra time this year, I will be working on a novel method for providing refinements for the approximate distributions for a class of econometric estimators in the case that either this distribution either fails to converge in the usual sense or is irregular in various ways, such as containing "spikes". Accompanying this method of approximation is a new type of statistical test which can adapt to the irregularities while being (asymptotically) non-conservative. This enables applied researchers to deal with pathological datasets for which the usual asymptotics may be unrealistic as a model and consequently the usual standard errors are invalid."

Michelle Hyun - "I am a microeconomic theorist working on contract theory and mechanism design. My project studies how firms assign projects when they must simultaneously manage risk, learn about their workers’ ability, and motivate them to work. Broadly, I am interested in understanding what drives inefficiency in worker learning—when do firms learn too little, and how does this affect workers’ opportunities and well-being."

Kentaro Sakata - "I work in macroeconomics and financial economics, with a particular interest in networks and information frictions. Prior to coming to Yale, I graduated from the University of Tokyo with a B.A. and M.A. in Economics. One of my projects studies the business cycle implications of financial linkages, especially their role in crisis nonlinearities. I also have several projects on production networks, as well as on incomplete information, some of which are joint work with coauthors. Broadly, I'm interested in how firms, financial institutions, and the linkages among them shape macroeconomic outcomes, and also how information frictions affect economic behavior."

Seung-Yong Yoo - "I'm a fifth-year PhD student in trade and urban economics, with a focus on infrastructure investment and technology adoption. I completed my undergraduate studies in economics and statistics at Yonsei University. During the fellowship semester, I will work on two projects on electric vehicle charging: one evaluating the role of infrastructure investment in technology adoption in a spatial economy, and a second, joint with co-authors, on the optimal design of charging infrastructure. Spatial economics has well-developed tools for valuing infrastructure that lowers the cost of an existing activity, but EV charging is different in that another main purpose of the investment is to induce adoption of a new technology. That makes it a rare chance to observe infrastructure shaping a technology transition as it unfolds, and to ask which forms of public investment most efficiently expedite one."