On June 5, three members of BFI’s Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) joined peers from institutions around the world in New Haven for the 2026 Pre-Doctoral Economics Conference. The event—which gathered pre-doctoral fellows (pre-docs) to share work in progress, meet peers, and trade feedback—was hosted and organized by pre-docs at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy.
The three from PREP came from across UChicago’s economics community. Lena Zofia Wisniewska is a Research Professional at the Development Innovation Lab (DIL), where she works with Professor Michael Kremer, and Julio Cesar Ballen Mugnol is a Haddad Research Professional at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, where he works with professors Kilian Huber and Niels Gormsen. The third presenter, Maiqi Yu, is a Research Professional at the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC), part of the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, where she works with the Climate Impact Lab.
Wisniewska presented “Power Struggles: The Gendered Employment Effects of Electricity Outages.” Originally her undergraduate thesis at the University of Cambridge and shared as a work in progress, the paper challenges the idea that women’s employment is more sensitive than men’s to the reliability of the electricity supply. Across 25 Sub-Saharan African countries, Wisniewska finds that electricity outages reduce men’s employment more than women’s, with skilled men the most exposed. This is in large part because outages hit energy-intensive sectors like manufacturing hardest, and since men are more concentrated in that work while women cluster in services, men absorb more of the loss.
Mugnol presented “The Effect of Free-Fare on Electoral Turnout,” a project that began as a term paper for a causal-inference course during his undergraduate studies at Insper in São Paulo. To measure the impact of free transit on voter turnout, Mugnol exploits the fact that Brazil already guarantees free transit to everyone 65 and older. Because those over 65 already rode free, they saw no change when 384 cities made transit free for all riders in the 2022 presidential runoff. Mugnol measures the policy’s effect by comparing the newly covered 60–64 group against the already covered 65–69 group within the same cities. He finds that the policy led to a small and mostly statistically insignificant change in turnout, with no spike among the 60–64 voters, suggesting transportation is a weaker barrier to voting than often assumed.
Finally, Yu presented joint work with co-author Yu Hui (University of Pennsylvania), “Displaced but Not Lost: Worker Displacement and Knowledge Spillover in the Labor Market,” a project that grew out of her master’s program at UChicago.
Challenging the standard view that job loss is purely costly, the authors start from the observation that a worker’s accumulated knowledge travels with them to the next employer. Linking decades of Italian administrative employment records to European patent data and applying a modern event-study estimator, they ask whether hiring a displaced worker raises innovation at the firm that hires them. They find it does—but on a delay, with patenting climbing in the fourth and fifth years after the hire, while voluntary job-movers produce no comparable effect. The spillover is strongest when the worker’s post-displacement wage rises and when the destination firm is innovative enough to absorb what the worker brings.
Together, UChicago’s three presenters at the 2026 Pre-Doctoral Economics Conference offer a distillation of the transition BFI’s pre-doctoral programming is built to cultivate, from coursework to original, publishable research.