Our Award Winning Faculty
Louis-Philippe Beland
Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair (Assistant level)
Professor Beland uses sound research designs to provide insight into important public policy issues touching public and labour economics. One of his research interest is externalities to traffic. Congestion levels have been increasing in most urban cities in Canada and the United States. The most obvious reason that traffic congestion is increasing widely is population growth. This is a serious concern since congestion levels are expected to continue to increase.
In his research, Professor Beland has documented various externalities to traffic, including the negative emotional cues associated with unexpected high traffic and its link to domestic violence. He also documented the cost of traffic on the work of first responders. His work shows that traffic slow down the time of arrival to an incident and show serious consequences. Some of his future work will study additional costs of traffics.
Zhiqi Chen
2019 SSHRC Insight Grant
Consumer Protection in the Age of Internet Commerce and Big Data
Last year, Canadians spent more than one billion dollars online. But along with that growth comes an increase in the commercial use of personal data and misleading pricing practices by Internet retailers.
Professor Chen has received $72,950 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to look at consumer protections within the e-commerce marketplace. He intends to conduct an analysis of the interactions between the collection and use of personal data by Internet firms and consumer’s privacy concerns, with the assumption that “privacy has intrinsic value which differs among consumers.”
Dana Galizia
2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Emergent Behaviour in Macroeconomics
What causes the booms and recessions that make up the business cycle? Although economists have devoted years of research on this question, there is no consensus on the answer.
A key challenge facing researchers is the complexity of the economic system. Economists rely on theoretical models to help them, but business cycle models, reflecting complex phenomena, are themselves generally complex and often are not fully understood.
Professor Galizia, will use a $32,530 grant for a research project developed to improve our understanding of one of the key features of many existing models: why and where do reasonable individual-level decisions made by economic agents interact in such a way as to produce outcomes that are at odds with those agents’ goals?
Lynda Khalaf
2019 SSHRC Insight Grant
Simulation-Based Inference on Measures of Financial Risk
After the 2008 recession, a number of studies questioned the ability of inference on risk premiums in equilibrium-based asset pricing models and statistical tail risk assessments to be reliable tools for efficient capital allocation and policy analysis.
SSHRC has awarded $289,000 to Professor Khalaf to assess these frameworks.
“Critiques underscore various pitfalls pertaining to statistical identification, assumptions on subsidiary although consequential effects, handling of big data and parameter stability,” explained Khalaf. “Motivated by these concerns, we seek to develop and implement improved tools that are informed by and will contribute to ongoing advances in econometrics.”
In collaboration with Jean-Marie Dufour (McGill University) and Marie-Claude Beaulieu (Université Laval), Khalaf will consider “asset pricing factor models including Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) motivated cross-sectional conditional and unconditional regressions, which imply that expected excess returns are determined solely and linearly by loadings on risk factors.”
The second research stream “focuses on risk assessment techniques, which include defining, estimating and back-testing risk measures.”
2019 NSERC Discovery Grant
Simulation-Based Multiple Inference Problems: Theory and Application
Professor Khalaf has been awarded a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for research that proposes a new methodology to measuring income inequality over time. She is the first faculty member in the Faculty of Public Affairs to receive an NSERC grant. Her project will receive $20,000 per year over a five-year period.
In her application, Professor Khalaf references research on inequality by Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets and more recently, economist Thomas Piketty that have “shaken the discipline worldwide.” Her research “aims to develop and validate concrete statistical tools towards evidence-based inequality analysis, building on the fact that inequality measures are multi-dimensional—both conceptually and definitionally.”
Christopher Worswick, Associate Dean (Research and International) for the Faculty of Public Affairs, says the project will offer a step forward in the analysis of income distribution.
“Many people are concerned that income inequality is worsening. This research will enable us to have confidence in our ability to test for change in income inequality over time,” he says. “This grant also demonstrates the Faculty of Public Affairs’ leadership in the areas of statistics, economics, and public policy more generally.”
Hashmat U. Khan
2020 Research Achievement Award
Macroeconomic Stability: Assessing the Roles of Monetary Policy Actions and the Inflation Environment
A conventional view is that when a central bank adjusts the policy interest rate more than one-for-one for each percent change in inflation, both inflation and unemployment remain low and stable. An alternative view is that the level of a country’s average inflation over a decade or so (the inflation environment) is the major determinant of stability. The proposal will develop a framework to assess these two views, while overcoming conceptual and computational challenges.
Khan says he is happy and honoured to receive the award, and he sees it as having a positive effect on his work:
“Research is a joyful and often bumpy endeavour. This recognition will inspire me to continue to enhance my work.”
2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Winners and Losers from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act:
A Quantitative Evaluation with an Open-Economy Heterogeneous Household Model
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 2017, introduced an unprecedented reduction in the American corporate tax rate: from 35% to 21%, a difference of 14 percentage points. Controversy about the short- and long-term benefits of the Act followed, with proponents claiming all taxpayers would profit, regardless of income level or source.
Meanwhile, north of the border, there has been little analysis of the effects of the legislation on the Canadian economy, despite close integration between the two economies. That’s about to change.
With the support of a $55,290 grant, Professor Khan along with Professor Lee, and Professor Razo-Garcia, will develop comprehensive models that can look at, among several aspects, how the TCJA would affect income distribution among Canadian households.
Minjoon Lee
2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Winners and Losers from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act:
A Quantitative Evaluation with an Open-Economy Heterogeneous Household Model
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 2017, introduced an unprecedented reduction in the American corporate tax rate: from 35% to 21%, a difference of 14 percentage points. Controversy about the short- and long-term benefits of the Act followed, with proponents claiming all taxpayers would profit, regardless of income level or source.
Meanwhile, north of the border, there has been little analysis of the effects of the legislation on the Canadian economy, despite close integration between the two economies. That’s about to change.
With the support of a $55,290 grant, Professor Lee, along with Professor Khan, and Professor Razo-Garcia, will develop comprehensive models that can look at, among several aspects, how the TCJA would affect income distribution among Canadian households.
“The Canadian government hasn’t taken any action in response to the Act,” says Lee. “Our models will allow us to explore what would happen if the government changed the corporate tax rate here specifically in response to the TCJA. We hope that policymakers will use the models to formulate the optimal response to such a tax change for the Canadian economy.”
2019 A National Pension Hub Grant
Forced Retirement Risk and Portfolio Choice
Professor Lee has received a National Pension Hub grant ($24,000 CAD) from the Global Risk Institute, for a project titled “Forced Retirement Risk and Portfolio Choice.” Professor Lee is the principal investigator and his collaborators are Guodong Chen (NYU-Shanghai) and Tong-yob Nam (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, US Department of Treasury).
2019 US Social Security Administration Grant
Nursing Homes in Equilibrium: Implications for Long-term Care Policies
Professor Lee received a US Social Security Administration grant ($50,000 USD), administered by the Michigan Retirement and Disability Research Center (MRDRC). The project is “Nursing Homes in Equilibrium: Implications for Long-term Care Policies”. Professor Lee is the principal investigator and the co-principal investigator is Tatyana Koreshkova (Concordia).
Simon Power
2019 FPA Teaching Fellowship Award
This award provides full-time FPA faculty and instructors an opportunity to innovate and demonstrate leadership in teaching, as well as to reward teaching excellence. The Fellowship is awarded on the basis of a candidate’s teaching record and on a project proposal focused on teaching innovation.
Professor Power received the fellowship for his proposal to use popular culture in the teaching of introductory Economics.
“The committee particularly noted Simon’s impressive commitment to teaching and, as one member noted, his [evident] gift for conveying complex ideas,” said Professor Mendeloff.
“Receiving the FPA Teaching Fellowship further reinvigorated my long-standing passion for teaching, which is, after all, the very raison d’être of the university,” says Power. “Good teaching does not simply involve the transmission of knowledge, perhaps even more importantly it also opens new doors, fosters creativity, expands horizons, nurtures resilience, and underpins the foundations of our great liberal society.”
Matthew Webb
2019 Research Achievement Award
Cluster Robust Inference With Binary Outcomes
Professor Matthew Webb‘s project will develop statistical tools that will enable people to reliably analyze and compare public policies such as tax changes and subsidies.
“These programs often change at the regional level, which makes statistical analysis difficult—largely because the observations may not be statistically independent from one another.”
Raúl Razo-Garcia
2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Winners and Losers from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act:
A Quantitative Evaluation with an Open-Economy Heterogeneous Household Model
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 2017, introduced an unprecedented reduction in the American corporate tax rate: from 35% to 21%, a difference of 14 percentage points. Controversy about the short- and long-term benefits of the Act followed, with proponents claiming all taxpayers would profit, regardless of income level or source.
Meanwhile, north of the border, there has been little analysis of the effects of the legislation on the Canadian economy, despite close integration between the two economies. That’s about to change.
With the support of a $55,290 grant, Professor Razo-Garcia along with Professor Khan, and Professor Lee, will develop comprehensive models that can look at, among several aspects, how the TCJA would affect income distribution among Canadian households.
“The Canadian government hasn’t taken any action in response to the Act,” says Lee. “Our models will allow us to explore what would happen if the government changed the corporate tax rate here specifically in response to the TCJA. We hope that policymakers will use the models to formulate the optimal response to such a tax change for the Canadian economy.”