About The Department

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Items 131-140 out of 331 displayed.

		Department-Wide Seminar: Bard Harstad On Wednesday, November 14, Bard Harstad from the University of Oslo joined us to speak about his paper, "Pledge-and-Review Bargaining: From Kyoto to Paris." Professor Harstad presented and analyzed a new bargaining model, and then embedded it into a dynamic climate change game in order to rationalize the key differences between the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol. This seminar was open to the public and took place at 4pm in E51-395.

		MIT alumnus William Nordhaus wins Nobel Prize in economic sciences William D. Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale University, won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Paul M. Romer of New York University's Stern School of Business. Nordhaus received his PhD from MIT in 1967 under the supervision of Robert M. Solow. He is known for his work on the long-term interaction of climate change and the economy.

		Amy Finkelstein wins 2018 MacArthur Fellowship The John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics, Amy Finkelstein, won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 for "formulating robust empirical methods to illuminate the hidden complexities of health care policy and provide data-driven guidance for future innovations in theory and practice." Photo credit to the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

		Second Fama Prize Awarded to Josh Angrist Chicago Booth's Eugene Fama Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Education recognizes authors of exceptional PhD-level textbooks in economics and finance. The second Fama Prize has been awarded to Joshua Angrist (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Jorn-Steffen (Steve) Pischke (London School of Economics) for their book Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2009.

		UEA Lecture: Mervyn King (Former Governor, Bank of England) Attend a special lunchtime lecture and Q&A ("28 Days that Shook the World: Ten Years On") with Mervyn King, the Former Governor of the Bank of England. Thursday, October 4th from 12:00 - 1:00 PM in E62-233. RSVP at mervynking.eventbrite.com.

		Featured Research: Amy Finkelstein studies health care spending Health economists are trying to find ways to reduce the United States's $3.3 trillion annual health spending, which is nearly double that of peer countries. A working paper co-authored by John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics, Amy Finkelstein, proposes that the health care system pay long-term care hospitals the same prices that are paid to skilled nursing facilities, thereby saving around 1% of the country's spending - $5 billion per year. Professor Finkelstein states that she was inspired by colleague and Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, Esther Duflo's, speech, "The Economist as Plumber," to find and solve small sources of inefficiency, which could add up.

		Featured: Doctoral student Ryan Hill discusses the experience of an early-career scientist MIT News features an article about Ryan Hill, a doctoral student in the Department of Economics, advised by Associate Professor Heidi Williams. Hill talks about the experience of raising a family while earning a Ph.D.; he is often seen advocating for the student family community at MIT. Hill was also given the opportunity to speak with members of Congress about the negative impacts of a proposed tax bill that would make tuition waivers taxable in 2017. When not spending time with his family, one can find Hill studying the risk of failed research projects and the "scooped" phenomenon.

		MIT economist, Jerry A. Hausman, elected to the British Academy The British Academy, UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences, honors Jerry Allen Hausman for his distinguished work in the field of economics. Professor Hausman is one of one of 76 scholars to be elected to the British Academy in 2018.

		Featured Research: Abhijit Banerjee studies Raskin, a social support program in Indonesia Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, is a social support program set up in the 1990s by the Indonesian goverment to provide rice to the country's most vulnerable families. Despite spending $1.5 billion a year, less than half of the rice was reaching the intended recipients. This is because many local officials were distributing rice to residents not on the poverty rolls or arbitrarily changing the subsidy price themselves. Banerjee and colleagues, including Ben Olken, another faculty member at MIT, began testing possible ways to fix the program in 2012. They sent postcards to the intended beneficiaries of Raskin in more than 500 villages that stated exactly what they were entitled to, which eliminated the village leaders' monopoly on information and resulting corruption.

		Featured Research: Amy Finkelstein studies Medicare spending on end-of-life care A new paper co-authored by Prof. Finkelstein, "Predictive modeling of U.S. healthcare spending in late life," challenges the widely held belief that a large portion of Medicare spending goes towards end-of-life care. The study found that although Medicare spending is concentrated among people who die, there is very little Medicare spending on patients whose death within the year is highly likely. Prof. Finkelstein says, "I do hope we stop pointing to end-of-life spending as an obvious problem. That's not to say there aren't problems in the U.S. health care system, but this is not a symptom of them."

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