Speakers 
Dionissi Aliprantis
Dionissi Aliprantis is the Director, Program on Economic Inclusion at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. His research focuses on human capital formation, racial inequality, and neighborhood effects. He has written papers on early childhood education and papers that investigate how landlords and wealth influence neighborhood sorting, that study what drives changes over time in both neighborhood demographics and the racial wealth gap, and that formally model and identify neighborhood effects. Interested in translating research into practice, Aliprantis currently serves as co-director of Greater Than Math, a program that invites middle school and high school students to solve mathematical and social problems. He has spent years implementing university programs that support local public schools, using math to build community and foster creativity among middle school and high school students. This work includes writing a math textbook for grades 7 through 12. He also has worked with Cleveland’s Promise Neighborhood and has evaluated community-driven approaches to development in Haiti. Aliprantis received a BS in mathematics and a BA in economics and Spanish from Indiana University and a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Esteban M. Aucejo
Esteban M. Aucejo is an associate professor of economics at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. His primary research focus is the economics of education, and his secondary focus is labor economics. Aucejo’s work has been published in Quantitative Economics, Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the American Economic Review. Aucejo received his bachelor’s degree in economics in his native Argentina before earning his master’s degree and doctorate in economics at Duke University.
Patrick Bayer
Patrick Bayer is the Gilhuly Family Professor of Economics at Duke University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as chair of the Duke economics department from 2009 to 2015. He served on the faculty at Yale University for seven years before joining Duke’s economics department in 2006. Bayer’s research focuses on a wide range of subjects including racial inequality and segregation, social interactions, discrimination, neighborhood effects, housing market dynamics, education, and criminal justice. His work has been published in Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Review, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is working on projects that examine unequal jury representation and its consequences, school spending, the intergenerational consequences of residential segregation, neighborhood tipping, gentrification, policing, and criminal justice. Bayer received his PhD in economics from Stanford University and his BA in mathematics from Princeton University.
Mary A. Burke
Mary A. Burke is a senior economist and policy advisor with New England Public Policy Center in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. She is an applied labor economist studying the economics of health behaviors and health outcomes, education, social norms, and the gig economy. Burke earned a BA in mathematics from Brown University and both an MA and PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the Boston Fed in 2005, she served as an assistant professor of economics at Florida State University. She gives regular briefings on the New England economy to senior leaders with the Federal Reserve System and to public audiences.
Kerwin K. Charles
Kerwin K. Charles is the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management. During his scholarly career, Charles has studied and published on earnings and wealth inequality, conspicuous consumption, race and gender labor market discrimination, the intergenerational transmission of economic status, worker and family adjustment to job loss and health shocks, non-work among prime-aged persons, and the labor market consequences of housing bubbles and sectoral change. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economics. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, is a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, and sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Labor Economics. Charles was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergmann Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy before being named the Indra K. Nooyi Dean of the Yale School of Management in 2019. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and taught economics and public policy at the University of Michigan before moving to the University of Chicago in 2005. He has received multiple teaching awards and his many academic leadership roles have included running centers and programs at the Harris School and serving as the school’s deputy dean and later its interim dean.
Lisa D. Cook
Lisa D. Cook is a professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University and a professor of international relations at Michigan State’s James Madison College. Among her current research interests are economic growth and development, financial institutions and markets, innovation, and economic history. Cook was a national fellow at Stanford University and served in the White House as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama in 2011 and 2012. She served as president of the National Economic Association and currently serves as director of the American Economic Association (AEA) Summer Training Program. She is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Sigma Xi distinguished lecturer. In 2019, Cook was elected to serve on the executive committee of the AEA. She is on the board of editors of the Journal of Economic Literature, and her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Growth, Explorations in Economic History, and the Business History Review, as well as in several books. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Economic History Association, and Harvard Business School, among others. Cook has held positions or conducted postdoctoral research at the National Bureau of Economic Research; the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis, New York, and Philadelphia; the World Bank; the Brookings Institution; the Hoover Institution (Stanford University); Salomon Brothers (now Citigroup); and C&S Bank (now Bank of America). She is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, the Advisory Board of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Advisory Board of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, and the board of directors of the Roosevelt Institute. Cook earned a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She has a BA from Spelman College, where she was the school’s first Marshall scholar, and she received a second BA from Oxford University in philosophy, politics, and economics.
Kalena Cortes
Kalena Cortes holds the Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Associate Professorship at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Education program, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor, and a scholar in the Mindset Scholars Network. She was named Texas A&M’s 2020 Presidential Impact Fellow. Cortes has been a visiting scholar at the graduate schools of education at both Stanford University and Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Princeton University. Cortes’ research interest is in the economics of education. Her research focuses on issues of equity and access, in particular, identifying educational policies that help disadvantaged students at the PK–12 and postsecondary levels. Her research has been published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Human Resources, Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the National Tax Journal. Cortes has been involved in a variety of major service activities, both on campus and in her profession. She is on the editorial board of the Economics of Education Review and is an associate editor of AERA Open. She also served on the editorial board of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She is a member of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession. Cortes served a three-year term on the board of directors of the Association for Education Finance and Policy and was a fellow at the Greater Texas Foundation. Cortes earned a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Robert W. Fairlie
Robert W. Fairlie is a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include entrepreneurship, education, information technology, racial inequality, labor economics, and immigration. Fairlie has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, two academic books, and numerous government and foundation reports. He has held visiting positions at Stanford University; Yale University; University of California, Berkeley; and Australian National University. Fairlie has received funding for his research from numerous government agencies and foundations including the National Science Foundation and Kauffman Foundation. He has testified to the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the US Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly regarding findings from his research, and he received a joint resolution from the California Legislature. Fairlie received his PhD and MA from Northwestern University and BA with honors from Stanford University.
Christopher L. Foote
Christopher L. Foote is a senior economist and policy advisor in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. His research and policy interests include housing and the macroeconomics of the labor market. Foote joined the Boston Fed in 2003 after serving as chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers. Also in 2003, he served for five months as an economic advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He returned briefly to Iraq in 2004. Foote graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1987 and then worked for two years as a newspaper reporter in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan in 1996. From 1996 to 2002, Foote taught in the economics department at Harvard University. Each spring, he teaches intermediate macroeconomics at Harvard, where he was named a Professor of the Practice of Economics in 2012.
Harry J. Holzer
Harry J. Holzer is the John LaFarge Jr. SJ Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an institute fellow at the American Institute for Research. He is a former chief economist for the US Department of Labor and a former professor of economics at Michigan State University. Holzer was a founding faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics and an affiliate of both the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Stanford Institute on Poverty and Inequality. Holzer is an expert on the low-wage labor market and has particularly studied the problems of minority workers in urban areas. He has authored or edited 12 books and several dozen journal articles, mostly on disadvantaged American workers and their employers and on education and workforce issues and labor market policy. Holzer received his BA (summa cum laude) and PhD from Harvard University.
Osborne Jackson
Osborne Jackson is a senior economist at the New England Public Policy Center in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. His research interests include labor economics and urban and regional economics. Jackson earned his BA in economics from Harvard University and his PhD and MA in economics from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Boston Fed in 2015, he was an assistant professor of economics at Northeastern University.
Rucker C. Johnson
Rucker C. Johnson is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in applied econometrics and topical courses in race, poverty, and inequality. Johnson is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As a labor economist who specializes in the economics of education, he focuses his work on the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances. Johnson was inducted as the Sir Arthur Lewis Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He also was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a member of the National Academy of Education, and he received the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and been featured in mainstream media outlets, and he has been invited to give policy briefings at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Johnson is the author of the book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. He is committed to advancing his scholarly agenda of fusing insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and remedies of inequality in this country. Johnson earned his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan.
Kevin Lang
Kevin Lang is a professor in Boston University’s Department of Economics, for which he served as chair from 2005 to 2009. He is a labor economist whose work spans theory, econometrics, and policy. He has written extensively on race discrimination, poverty policy, and education. Lange is an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London), a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn), and a fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University). For many years, Lang has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor Economics. Previously, he served as a co-editor of Labour Economics, the official journal of the European Association of Labor Economists, from 2005 to 2013 and remains an associate editor. Before joining the Boston University faculty, Lang spent a year at the National Bureau of Economic Research as an Olin Foundation Fellow, and before that he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. During his tenure at Boston University, Lang has twice visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, once as a visiting scholar and once as a visiting professor. He spent three months at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Lang spent recent sabbaticals at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy; the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney; the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration in London, Harvard University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Lang received his BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, his MSc in economics from the University of Montreal, and his PhD in economics from MIT.
Helen Levy
Helen Levy is a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, School of Public Health, and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She is the associate director of the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. Levy is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests include the causes and consequences of lacking health insurance, evaluation of public health insurance programs, and material hardship among older Americans. She is an associate director of the Health and Retirement Study, a long-running longitudinal study of health and economic dynamics at older ages. Before coming to the University of Michigan Levy was an assistant professor at the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010 and 2011, Levy served as a senior economist to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, DC. She earned a PhD in economics from Princeton University and a BA in mathematics and history from Yale University.
Glenn C. Loury
Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and a professor of economics at Brown University. He has taught previously at Boston University, Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan. An academic economist, Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He has been elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, member of the American Philosophical Society, vice president of the American Economics Association, and president of the Eastern Economics Association. In 2005, Loury won the John von Neumann Award, given annually by the Rajk László College of the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration to “an outstanding economist whose research has exerted a major influence on students of the college over an extended period of time.” He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. He has given the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford (2007), the James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton (2003), and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard (2000.) Writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Loury has published more than 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the United States and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. Loury’s books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (winner of the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality; Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK; and Race, Incarceration and American Values. Loury holds a BA in mathematics from Northwestern University and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
John M. MacDonald
John M. MacDonald is a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly research includes the study of crime and violence, race and ethnic disparities in criminal justice, and the effect of public policy responses on crime. In 2012, he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management for his contributions to public policy. In 2017, he was elected fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. His research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Annual Review of Criminology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Criminology and Public Policy. A current focus of his research is on how policies and programs that change the land use of places can reduce crime and improve health in communities. His most recent book, with coauthors Charles Branas and Robert Stokes, Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning (2019), draws on the latest research in city planning, economics, criminology, public health, and other fields to demonstrate how well-designed changes to a place can significantly improve the well-being of large groups of people. He is also active in studying racial disparities in criminal justice processing and ways to reduce these disparities through policy and program reforms. MacDonald received his PhD and MA in criminology from the University of Maryland. He earned a BA in political science from Vassar College.
Melissa McInerney
Melissa McInerney is a professor of economics at Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she was on the faculty at the College of William and Mary. In her widely published work, she studies questions relevant to social policy. Her work examines the Medicare program, workplace injuries and compensation for injured workers, and wage gaps by race and ethnicity. McInerney’s research has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Public Economics, and Health Affairs. She is a recipient of research grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the US Department of Labor, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Labor Research, and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. McInerney holds a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, an MPP from Georgetown University, and a BA from Carleton College.
H. Naci Mocan
H. Naci Mocan is the Ourso Distinguished Chair in Economics at Louisiana State University’s E.J. Ourso College of Business. He is also a research associate with National Bureau of Economics Research, a research fellow with Institute for the Study of Labor, and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Labor Research. Before joining the economics department at Louisiana State in 2007, Mocan was a professor of economics and director of the Center for Research on Economic and Social Policy at the University of Colorado Denver. Mocan’s research focuses on the determinants of criminal activity and issues in law and economics, among other topics. His current research investigates the interplay between culture, institutions, emotions, and economic behavior. His research has been published in various academic journals including the American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, The Economic Journal, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Labor Economics, and others. Mocan has served as a consultant for public and private institutions, including the US Department of Justice, the RAND Corporation, the New York City Independent Budget Office, the Governor’s Office of the State of Colorado, and the Ministry of Employment and Workforce Development of Canada. He is a member of the Louisiana Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Mocan received his PhD in economics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A native of Turkey, he received his BA in economics from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
Kenneth C. Montgomery
Kenneth C. Montgomery is the interim president and chief executive officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a role he assumed October 1, 2021 while serving as first vice president and chief operating officer. Montgomery leads the strategic direction and effective management of the Reserve Bank’s regional and national responsibilities.
In a national capacity, Montgomery is leading the Federal Reserve System’s FedNowSM Service to support faster payments in the United States with interbank real-time gross settlement and integrated clearing. This initiative is part of the Federal Reserve’s ongoing, collaborative efforts to enhance the speed, safety, and efficiency of the U.S. payment system.
Sarah J. Reber
Sarah J. Reber is an associate professor of public policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Reber is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research in education focuses on school desegregation, elementary and secondary school finance, and college access. Her research in health economics examines racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality and the advantages and disadvantages of promoting competition in health insurance markets. After receiving her PhD in economics from Harvard University, Reber was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. She was also a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar and a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
John Sabelhaus
John Sabelhaus is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct research professor at the University of Michigan. He also provides independent consulting to groups such as the US Census Bureau (through the Mitre Corporation), the AARP Public Policy Institute, Economic and Social Development Canada, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (through NORC). Sabelhaus was a visiting scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in 2019 and 2020. Before that, he was assistant director in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. At the Federal Reserve Board, his oversight of the Microeconomic Surveys and Household and Business Spending sections included primary responsibility for the Survey of Consumer Finances. Before joining the Federal Reserve Board staff, Sabelhaus was a senior economist at the Investment Company Institute and chief of long-term modeling at the Congressional Budget Office, where he oversaw the development of an integrated micro/macro model of Social Security and Medicare. He also served as an adjunct in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland from 1999 to 2018. Sabelhaus received his PhD, MA, and BA in economics from the University of Maryland.
Jeffrey P. Thompson
Jeffrey P. Thompson is a vice president and economist in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department, where he is the director of the New England Public Policy Center. Prior to joining the Boston Fed in 2018, Thompson was a principal economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the microeconomic surveys section. He specializes in household finance; income, wealth and consumption inequality; state and local taxes; and regional economics. His research has been published in the Review of Income and Wealth, the Journal of Macroeconomics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Economic Inquiry, Contemporary Economic Policy, the Journal of Regional Science, and the National Tax Journal, and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Before joining the Federal Reserve System, Thompson was an assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute, an independent unit of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a BA in political science, with a minor in economics, from Lewis & Clark College and a PhD in economics from Syracuse University.
Susan M. Wachter
Susan M. Wachter is the Albert E. Sussman Professor of Real Estate and a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. From 1998 to 2001, she served as assistant secretary for policy development and research with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and as the senior urban policy official and principal advisor to the secretary. During Wachter’s tenure at HUD, her office was responsible for the New Markets Tax Credit. At the Wharton School, she was chairperson of the Real Estate Department and professor of real estate and finance in 1997 and 1998 before her appointment to HUD. Wachter co-founded and is co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She also founded and serves as director of Wharton’s Geographical Information Systems Lab. She was the editor of Real Estate Economics from 1997 to 1999 and serves on the editorial boards of several real estate journals. Wachter is the author of more than 200 scholarly publications and the recipient of several awards for teaching excellence at the Wharton School. She has served on multiple for-profit and not-for-profit boards and advisory committees, including the Office of Financial Research Advisory Committee of the US Treasury. She currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce.
Emily K. Weisburst
Emily K. Weisburst is an assistant professor of public policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on topics in labor economics and public finance, including criminal justice and education. Weisburst earned her PhD in economics from the University of Texas at Austin. While in graduate school, she worked as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President and as a research associate for the RAND Corporation on joint projects with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Weisburst has received the NAED Spencer Dissertation Fellowship to support her research on the impact of funding for police in public schools on student disciplinary outcomes and educational attainment in Texas. Her research interests include understanding the factors that affect police decision-making and public trust in police. She is also interested in how interactions with the criminal justice system affect individuals, families, and communities. Weisburst has an MA in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in economics from Dartmouth College.
Paul S. Willen
Paul S. Willen is a senior economist and policy advisor in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. Willen conducts academic research with a focus on real estate and mortgage markets as part of the policy mission of the Federal Reserve. For many years, Willen studied the causes and consequences of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, publishing articles in top scholarly journals, advising policymakers, and testifying in Congress. His research on the topic was featured in virtually every major newspaper in the country. More recently, Willen has analyzed the effects of race and ethnicity on access to mortgage credit. Willen has taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. He did his undergraduate work at Williams College and earned his PhD from Yale University.
Crystal S. Yang
Crystal S. Yang is a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Yang’s teaching and research interests center on empirical law and economics, particularly in the areas of criminal justice and consumer bankruptcy. Her current research includes empirical projects on the effects of the bail system on defendants’ short- and long-term outcomes, racial bias in the criminal justice system, and the spillover effects of deportation fear. In addition to being published in various economics journals and law reviews, her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the Boston Globe, among other media outlets, and it has been cited by the US Supreme Court.In 2014 and 2015, Yang served as a special assistant US attorney in the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was a John M. Olin and Terence M. Considine Fellow and recipient of the John M. Olin Prize. She also received her PhD in economics from Harvard University and was a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Yang earned an AB in economics (summa cum laude) and an AM in statistics from Harvard University.