Battaglini

Bianchi

Caunedo

Huckfeldt

Lu

Nimark

Pattachini

An ambitious fundraising campaign has made it possible to expand the universitywide Department of Economics by hiring seven new faculty members for the new academic year.

“Our alumni have been exceptionally supportive of our efforts in recruiting new faculty. Great leadership and dedication on the part of the faculty in the department has also contributed a great deal to their success this year,” said Gretchen Ritter, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The department is very excited to bring these impressive scholars to Cornell, and we look forward to interesting new collaborations,” said Kevin Hallock, the Donald C. Opatrny ’74 Chair of the Department of Economics, the Joseph R. Rich ’80 Professor of Economics and of Human Resource Studies, and director of the Institute for Compensation Studies in the ILR School.

The economics department is a merger of the College of Arts and Sciences and ILR School economics departments. It includes senior faculty with joint appointments at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the College of Human Ecology’s Department of Policy Analysis and Management. The faculty expansion will enable the department to offer more courses to its growing student body; it currently serves more than 5,000 students each year, including more than 750 majors and 100 Ph.D. students.

The newly endowed Edward H. Meyer Professorship, created by a gift from Ed Meyer ’48, will be filled by Marco Battaglini, currently professor of economics at Princeton University. He is also director of Princeton’s William S. Dietrich II Economic Theory Center, associate editor of Econometrica and foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in three years from Northwestern University in 2000; seven years later he was appointed a full professor at Princeton. He studies economic theory, game theory, contract theory, political economy and laboratory experiments. In 2005 he won a National Science Foundation Career Award and in 2006 was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

Eleonora Pattachini, currently at Syracuse University, will join the faculty as an associate professor. She is a specialist in panel data econometrics, spatial statistics, labor economics, urban economics, social networks and financial networks.

Four macroeconomists will join the faculty as assistant professors. Francesco Bianchi’s research focuses on monetary and fiscal policy, central banks and the Great Recession. Kristoffer Nimark is a specialist on monetary policy and business cycles, Julieta Caunedo is an expert in quantitative economics and aggregate fluctuations, and Christopher Huckfeldt is researching unemployment fluctuations, match quality and the wage cyclicality of new hires. Cuanedo and Huckfeldt have been named Christensen Sesquicentennial Fellows.

The department has also hired one new micro-theorist: Jay Lu ’06 will be an assistant professor; his interests include economic and decision theories, and behavioral and financial economics.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.