Two new faculty members will join the Economics community at the Institute as of September 2021. We are very pleased to welcome Ms Yuan Zi and Ms IMELDA, who specialise respectively in trade, and environmental and resource economics as new assistant professors in the department.
IMELDA is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Carlos III University in Madrid where she works with Natalia Fabra on an ERC-funded project that investigates policies to achieve the energy transition with the least cost. She holds a BA in Economics from the University of Padjadjaran, Indonesia, and obtained her PhD in Economics at the University of Hawaii in 2018. Her research explores the intersections of health, energy, gender, and environmental economics, looking at how clean energy transition and policies can improve welfare and market outcomes, answering questions such as: What are the health impact and economic consequences of a cleaner energy transition? How much modern energy access can improve labor outcomes and reduce gender disparity? What is the social cost of having renewable energy in the electricity system? How much variable pricing can help in reducing the social cost of renewable energy? How can pricing renewables regulation improve market efficiency? She already has publications in the Journal of Development Economics and the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings and a lot of exciting work to come.
The Department is extremely grateful to André Hoffmann for his support in Imelda's appointment and more generally, his support in research and teaching environmental issues at the Institute. Imelda will also join the Centre for International Environmental studies (CIES).
Yuan Zi is currently Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo and a Senior Researcher at University of Zurich. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) since 2019. She holds a BA in Economics from Renmin University of China and obtained her PhD from the Graduate Institute in 2017. She received he Review of World Economy prize for one of the papers from dissertation on “Trade Liberalization and the Great Labor Reallocation”. Her research interests focus on global value chains, trade and labour market interactions and firms in international trade. She has publications in the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Economic Geography and the European Economic Review, as well as a number of fascinating pieces in the pipeline, including joint work with Andrew Bernard, Andreas Moxnes, and Karen Ulltveit-Moe.
Yuan will join the very active ecosystem of trade research and policy in Geneva. She will also contribute to the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration.
With these two new appointments, the Economics Department reinforces its competencies in areas with pressing global challenges. Yuan and Imelda contribute greatly to the Department's core mission to develop state-of-the-art research on policy relevant issues in such areas. They will also make the faculty more diverse and improve its gender balance.
Damien NEVEN
Professor of Economics
Head of the Economics Department