On Tues., Oct. 25, our own Jesse Shapiro will deliver a Presidential Award Lecture titled "How to Talk like a Republican, and Other Lesson from Using Text as Data." Shapiro is only the sixth Brown faculty member chosen to deliver such a lecture since the programs initiation in 2013. See more.

The first public lecture sponsored by the Economics Department this academic year will be the Frederic B. Garonzik Lecture, organized by the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance. Fabrizio Zilibotti, professor of macroeconomics and politcal economy at the University of Zurich, will discuss "China at a Turning Point: The Difficult Transition from Investment-Led to Innovation-Led Growth." The talk is open to the entire Brown University community and will take place at 85 Waterman Street, rm. 130, from 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday Sept. 13.

As discussed in the New York Times, a new paper by Brown’s Jesse Shapiro and co-authors Matthew Gentzkow and Matt Taddy applies novel methods to measuring changes in political polarization between the major parties from 1873 to 2009. Their measure finds the partisan divide in vocabulary to be low and roughly constant until the early 1990s, then dramatically increased. Other coverage

Pascal Michaillat, a macroeconomist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, is joining the faculty of Brown’s Economics department. After teaching several years at London School of Economics, he’ll be an Assistant Professor at Brown on his arrival in the summer of 2016. Michaillat’s research has focused on a variety of topics related to unemployment, and he will teach undergraduate intermediate macroeconomics during his first year at Brown. 

Fifteen students completing their Ph.D. degrees this year have accepted offers obtained in this year’s job market, while seventeen applicants who were offered places in it have accepted admission into the graduate program of Brown’s Economics Department. Graduating students are launching their careers with positions at U.S. and foreign universities, and in government and industry.