It has been a tremendously exciting year to be the chair of the Economics Department. We are in the midst of an aggressive program to further improve the department. Seven new faculty members have accepted offers to join us, and our recruiting efforts continue at both the junior and senior levels. Our graduate students continue to impress us (and the profession in general) with their innovative and ambitious research. And our new Director of Undergraduate Studies, Ben Polak, is bringing his characteristic enthusiasm and creativity to our curriculum and to our planning for a potential expansion in the size of Yale College.

We welcome three new assistant professors. Costas Arkolakis finished his PhD at the University of Minnesota and works in international economics. Much of his research is empirical and on the boundaries between international and I.O. and/or macro. Patrick Kline is an applied microeconomist from the University of Michigan. He has a broad range of research interests that include the dynamic allocation of labor, economic geography and urban development, crime and social interactions, and program evaluation. Kareen Rozen is an economic theorist from Princeton. She works primarily in decision theory and game theory, with a strong emphasis on behavioral economics and applied theory in industrial organization. Both she and Kline were invited to join this year’s Review of Economic Studies tour.

In addition, four new senior faculty have arrived on campus. Xiaohong Chen comes to us from NYU. Xiaohong is a theoretical econometrician with wide-ranging interests in semi- and non-parametric estimation, sieve methods, and adoptive learning. She will play a leading role in our superb group of econometric theorists. Giovanni Maggi studies international political economy. He joins us (from Princeton) as part of a special initiative supported by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies to recruit leading scholars who can help build connections across disciplines. Giovanni is co-directing the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. Larry Samuelson moved from Wisconsin to join our economic theory group. He is a leading game theorist and a co-editor of Econometrica. Our most recent arrival is Ed Vytlacil, an applied econometrician recruited from Columbia. His broad interests and energy will likely make him a focal point for collaborations that include our econometricians and applied microeconomists.

While we’ve had a wonderful year welcoming new arrivals, we have had to face a number of departures. Penny Goldberg (literally) switched offices with Giovanni Maggi when she left us for Princeton. George Mailath returned to Penn after a brief stay here. And Hanming Fang has moved to Duke University. Three of our senior colleagues, T. Paul Schultz, Martin Shubik and Robert Evenson, have retired after long and distinguished careers at Yale. We have been providing resources such as office space to encourage emeritus faculty to remain active in the department, so we hope to benefit from their continued presence and research activities.

The Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted a new tenure system which is in closer alignment with conventional tenure systems in American academia, although we retain a longer "clock" and, of course, exceptionally high standards. Perhaps the most welcome aspect of the change for our faculty is that all new junior hires are assured of two full years of leave before they are considered for tenure.

Enough news for now. There must be a seminar or research group lunch to attend. Or perhaps I’ll just step downstairs and see what the graduate students are arguing about today.

— Christopher Udry 
Winter 2008