Nick Bloom is internationally renowned for his research on working from home, which became a worldwide phenomenon during the Covid pandemic. Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, was our guest speaker at this year’s Merrick Lecture, hosted in partnership with the UVA Department of Economics.

Timothy Layton is an associate professor of public policy and economics, specializing in health economics, at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Layton's research focuses on the economics of health insurance markets, with a particular focus on markets and social health insurance programs for low-income households. His research involves a mix of empirical and conceptual work studying how and why health insurance markets often struggle to provide the contracts consumers want at prices they can afford.

Andrew Simon is an assistant professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He is a public finance economist who studies the incidence of state and local public policies across individuals and geography. His current research focuses on higher education finance, such as the causes and consequence of state divestment in public colleges, as well as taxation, and employment policy. 

The Economics Undergraduate Career Forum brings together professionals who hold undergraduate economics degrees with current students and faculty through networking events and educational programming to expose majors and prospective majors to potential professional experiences. The program combines informal networking opportunities with more structured career panels, talks, and office hours. Our hope is that these programs will provide valuable career-related information for students while facilitating and strengthening relationships between all participants.

Air pollution can have serious consequences for a person’s quality of life. Inhaling high concentrations of “fine particulate matter,” or particles approximately 40 times smaller than a grain of sand, has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and even death Jonathan Colmer told an online audience last week.

Parag A. Pathak is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics at MIT, found­ing co-director of the NBER Working Group on Market Design, and founder of MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII), a laboratory focused on education, human capital, and the income distribution.

Jointly sponsored by Curry, Economics, and the Frank Batten School

Leora Friedberg is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the Batten School and an associate professor and Vice Chair at UVA's Department of Economics. Her focus is on labor economics, including research on social security, aging and retirement economic impacts.

Charles Holt is a professor of economics and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the A. Willis Robertson Professor of Political Economy at the University of Virginia. Holt is also the current Director of the Experimental Economics Laboratory at Virginia, where he develops and programs the web-based VeconLab experiments that are widely used for teaching and research with over 90,000 participant logins per year.

John V. Pepper is a professor of economics and public policy at the Batten School and a professor of economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia. His work examines identification problems that arise when evaluating a wide range of public policy questions including such subjects as health and disability programs, welfare policies (e.g., SNAP), and drug and crime policies.

Jay Shimshack is a professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Shimshack's research focuses on environmental regulation, environmental economics, corporate social behavior, and applied microeconomics for public policy.