Each summer, Joel Waldfogel and I organize a weekly seminar series featuring research in applied economics (broadly defined) being pursued by Carlson School faculty and doctoral students entering their job market year. We organize through the e-mail list csomsummerecon@umn.edu and our Google calendar. E-mail me if you would like to be added to our e-mail list.
Lists. If you or someone you know would be interested in joining the list, (e.g. new faculty/ PhD students), e-mail me at bensona@umn.edu.
Time/place. We meet Thursdays, 12-1 pm, from May 29 - Aug 28, 2025. We have two exceptions: we don't meet July 3, and our June 19th meeting is moved to June 18th in honor of Juneteenth. The Zoom link is on the Google Calendar and our e-mails.
Format. Due to CSOM construction, we'll be on Zoom in 2025.
Scheduling. Priority will be given to CSOM junior faculty and job market candidates doing work in applied economics (broadly defined). Second priority will be for presenters who sign up by Friday, April 18th. Remaining spots, if applicable, will fill ad hoc.
Attendance. We are open to all faculty, PhD students, researchers, and their guests at UMN and otherwise.
Good karma. As a community norm, presenters should attend the summer series when able.
May 29
Dayton Steele, Assistant Professor in SCO, presents "Consumers’ Role in Circularity Execution: Evidence from Field & Lab Experiments," joint with Atalay Atasu (INSEAD), Saravanan Kesavan (BITSoM).
June 5
Erik Loualiche, Assistant Professor, Finance, presents "Causal inference for asset pricing."
June 12
Moshe Barach, Assistant Professor, SME, presents "The Invisible Hand of AI: Coordinating Cognition in Decision-Making Process," joint with Linhui Wu, Shaker Zahra, Niron Hashai (Reichman University), and Yining Luo (Zhejiang).
June 18 (Wednesday at noon in honor of Juneteenth)
Thomas Helgerman, Assistant Professor, WORG, presents "Women in Law and the Draft," joint with Benjamin Pyle (BU).
June 26
Jacelly Cespedes, Assistant Professor, Finance, presents "Financial Technologies, Labor Markets, and Wage Inequality: Evidence from Instant Payment Systems," joint with Carlos Parra (Pontificia), Carlos Burga (Pontificia), and Bernardo Ricca (Insper).
July 10
Jianxuan Lei, PhD Candidate, WORG, presents his job market paper, "Normalizing opposition to labor unions: The impact of the 1981 PATCO strike on union organizing."
July 17
Marco Jang, PhD Candidate, WORG, presents his job market paper, "The Cost of Specialist Signaling: Visibility and Opportunity of Online Professional Profiles," joint with Alan Benson, Ming Leung (UC Irvine).
July 24
Nan Li, Assistant Professor, Accounting, presents "Accounting Entropy: Measuring Information of Accounting Classification," joint with Pierre Jinghong Liang, Jane Jae Yeon Pyo, Gaoqing Zhang (all CMU).
July 31
Mochen Yang, Associate Professor, IDSC, presents "LLM for data fitting," joint with Hejia Liu, Gedas Adomavicius.
August 7
Yasaman Asayesh, PhD Candidate, SCO, presents her job market paper "From Factories to Streets? The Impact of Ridesharing Services on Labor Turnover in US Manufacturing," joint with Anant Mishra.
August 14
Chaofan Zhai, PhD candidate, IDSC, presents his job market paper. Paper is TBA, either "Towards Sustainable Learning in Online Education: A Reinforcement Learning Approach," or "Recommending for Influencer Marketing: A Customer-Aware Attention Network with a Field Experiment." Joint with Yicheng Song, Xuan Bi, and Ravi Bapna.
August 21
Jing Gao, PhD Candidate, Finance, presents her job market paper "Equity Spillovers: Institutional Equity Shareholdings and Firms' Debt Financing."
August 28
Sunasir Dutta, Assistant Professor, SME, presents "The WWI shock to industrial entrepreneurship in China, and its social consequences," joint with Caiwei Zhang.