New Department Faculty Autumn 2012

The Department of Economics is delighted to welcome several new faculty members who will be joining us autumn quarter 2012:

Patrick Bajari will join the faculty as Professor of Economics, specializing in econometrics and industrial organization. Professor Bajari taught most recently at the rank of Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 1997 with a dissertation titled "The First Price Auction With Asymmetric Bidders: Theory and Applications." He previously taught at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Harvard University. He is a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and San Francisco and a Hoover Institution National Fellow.

Professor Bajari has served as Managing Editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization, and Associate Editor of both the Journal of Business and Economics Statistics and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. He has been an invited participant in numerous international conferences, has organized several conferences, and has more than 30 published papers in leading journals.

At Minnesota and elsewhere, Professor Bajari has taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, in areas such as Industrial Organization, Applied Microeconomics, and Econometrics. He has been thesis advisor or on the dissertation committees of dozens of students. This fall at UW, Professor Bajari will teach Applied Econometrics.

Rachel M. Heath will begin teaching classes this fall as an Assistant Professor. Hired in July 2011, Heath took a year of leave to accept a post-doctoral appointment with the development research department of the World Bank in Washington D.C. for the 2011-2012 academic year. Heath, who specializes in development and labor economics, completed her Ph.D. in 2011 at Yale University. Her dissertation is titled "Why Do Firms Hire Using Referrals? Evidence from Bangladeshi Garment Factories," which has also been submitted as a working paper. The recipient of numerous fellowships and honors, Heath has been an instructor and teaching fellow for American Economic History, introductory microeconomics, and The Economics of Developing Countries.

For her dissertation work in development economics, Heath traveled to Bangladesh. Read about her fieldwork and see photos here.

In her spare time, Heath is a marathon runner and country music enthusiast.

Dennis O'Dea will join the faculty this fall as a Senior Lecturer in macroeconomics. O'Dea is currently a lecturer in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his Ph.D. in economics in 2010 with a dissertation titled "Three Essays on Social Networks." His research interests include applied microeconomics, social networks, industrial organization, labor, and macroeconomics. O'Dea has several working papers exploring the economics of social networks and network formation, and has presented at several recent regional and national conferences.

O'Dea's teaching experience includes introductory and intermediate microeconomics courses and introductory macroeconomics, and he has been an assistant instructor for microeconomics in the Masters of Science in Policy Economics program at Illinois. He completed the University of Illinois' Center for Teaching Excellence's Graduate Teaching Certificate, and has been named to the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent seven times while there. This fall at Washington, O'Dea will teach Econ 201, Introduction to Macroeconomics, and Econ 450, Public Finance.

In his free time, O'Dea enjoys outdoor sports such as running and ultimate frisbee.

Mu-Jeung Yang just completed requirements for the doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley and will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor. Yang’s main work is in the area of macroeconomics with an application to international issues. His job market paper was entitled “Micro-Level Misallocation and Selection: Estimation and Aggregate Implications.” It addresses the question of determining the aggregate productivity losses from the misallocation of resources across firms.

Born and raised in Germany by Korean parents, Yang did his undergraduate studies in economics at the University of Bonn, one of the most prestigious departments in that country. As part of his undergraduate studies he was a visiting student at the University of California, Berkeley, to which he later returned to do his PhD. During the course of his PhD dissertation he spent a substantial period of time at the University of Chicago, where his main advisor had relocated. Yang also worked closely with a faculty member at Stanford University in conducting his graduate research.

In addition to his job market paper, Yang has a number of papers in process. Broadly focused on the area of productivity in international markets, Yan'gs current portfolio of papers includes some aspects of the aftermath of the financial crisis. He has another joint paper dealing with fiscal news and dynamic government expenditure multipliers.