BFI Invitational: Driving the Future of Economics

Francesca Bastianello’s research interests lie at the intersection of finance, macroeconomics, and behavioral economics. In her research she builds on insights from behavioral economics to develop tractable models of non-rational beliefs, and studies their aggregate financial and macroeconomic implications.

Bastianello earned a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University, and also holds an M.Phil. in Economic Research and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, Trinity College.

Anthony Fowler, the Sydney A. Stein Jr. Professor, applies econometric methods for causal inference to questions in political science, with particular emphasis on elections and political representation. Specific interests include unequal political participation, electoral selection and incentives, political polarization, and the credibility of empirical research. He is an editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, an author of Thinking Clearly with Data, and a host of Not Another Politics Podcast.

At Harris, Fowler has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Editor of the Center for Effective Government’s Primer Series on Political Reform, and a member of the Dean’s Advisory Committee. At the University, he currently serves on the Council of the University Senate and previously served on the College Council.

John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wyoming. List joined the UChicago faculty in 2005, and served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012-2018. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was a professor at the University of Central Florida, University of Arizona, and University of Maryland.

List was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. He is currently the Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. He received the Arrow Prize for Senior Economists in 2008, the Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2010, the Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize in 2012, the Klein Lecture Prize in 2016, and the Hartsook Growing Philanthropy Award in 2017. He received an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University in 2014 and from the University of Ottawa in 2017. John was also named a Top 50 Innovator in the Non-Profit Times for 2015 and 2016 for his work on charitable giving. He served in the White House on the Council of Economic Advisers from 2002-2003 and is a Research Associate at the NBER, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a University Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), and a University Fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

His research focuses on questions in microeconomics, with a particular emphasis on using field experiments to address both positive and normative issues. For decades his field experimental research has focused on issues related to the inner-workings of markets, the effects of various incentives schemes on market equilibria and allocations, how behavioral economics can augment the standard economic model, on early childhood education and interventions, and most recently on the gender earnings gap in the gig economy (using evidence from rideshare drivers).

His research includes over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published books, including the 2013 international best-seller, *The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life* (with Uri Gneezy).

Brent Neiman is the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth. He served from 2022-2025 at the U.S. Treasury as Counselor to the Secretary and as the Deputy Undersecretary for International Finance, where he worked on a broad set of international economic issues, including the bilateral relationship with China, the response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, emerging market sovereign debt, IMF governance and programs, and global financial regulation.

Neiman conducts research on international macroeconomics, finance, and trade. He serves as the co-director of the International Economics and Economic Geography Initiative at the Becker Friedman Institute, participates as a panelist at the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum, and is a Research Associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics and the International Trade and Investment groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Neiman co-founded the Global Capital Allocation Project, previously served as an Executive Board member of the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets at Chicago Booth, and was an associate editor of The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Journal of International Economics.

Earlier in his career, Neiman was the staff economist for international finance on the White House Council of Economic Advisers and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, at McKinsey and Company, and at the McKinsey Global Institute.

In 2014, Neiman was one of the eight economics professors in the United States and Canada to receive the Sloan Research Fellowship, an award given to early-career scientists. In 2009, Neiman was named as one of 22 “Emerging Leaders” by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. He has been a co-recipient of the Economics in Central Banking Award and the AQR Insight Award, and was awarded a Thouron Fellowship, which funded his graduate studies at Oxford.

Neiman earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics and a Bachelor of Applied Science, both summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. In 2000, he earned a master’s degree in mathematical modeling from Oxford University, and he earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2008. Neiman joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008.

Outside the classroom, Neiman is an enthusiastic golfer and was a bench warmer on the 1998 Ivy League Champion golf team as an undergraduate. He also enjoys travel and is always up for dim sum.

Matthew Notowidigdo studies a broad set of topics in labor and health economics. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of unemployment duration dependence, the incidence of local labor demand shocks, and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. Notowidigdo’s research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labor supply, the effects of health on the marginal utility of consumption, and the effects of income on health spending. Notowidigdo is an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a member of the Board of Editors at the American Economic Journal – Economic Policy, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.

Christopher Stewart is broadly interested in empirical accounting research, but he has a special focus on research questions that lie at the intersection of corporate law, corporate finance, and accounting.

Stewart joined Chicago Booth in 2020. He holds a PhD and Master of Commerce in Accounting from the University of Melbourne, an MBA in Finance from Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), and a BA from Laurentian University (Canada). Additionally, during his doctoral studies, he spent time as a visiting PhD student at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Outside of academia, Stewart has professional experience as a financial analyst at General Motors of Canada, and as the founder of a technology company, which he sold to a private equity firm in 2009. He has teaching experience as a lecturer at The University of Melbourne, and at Dankook University in Seoul, Korea where he taught accounting and finance.

Chad Syverson is the George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the university.

His research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. Syverson has authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly articles and is the coauthor (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) of intermediate-level textbook, Microeconomics. Syverson is a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a Distinguished Fellow of the Industrial Organization Society, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served on multiple National Academies committees. He teaches classes in industrial organization.

Syverson received a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2001. Before that, he earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and mechanical engineering from the University of North Dakota in 1996.

Richard H. Thaler is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is the director of the Center for Decision Research, and is the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Thaler is the co-author (with Cass R. Sunstein) of the global best seller Nudge (2008) in which the concepts of behavioral economics are used to tackle many of society’s major problems. In 2015 he published Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. He has authored or edited four other books: Quasi-Rational Economics, The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, and Advances in Behavioral Finance (editor) Volumes I and II. He has published numerous articles in prominent journals such as the American Economics Review, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Political Economy.

Thaler is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Finance Association and the Econometrics Society, and in 2015 served as the President of the American Economic Association.

Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1995 Thaler taught at the University of Rochester and Cornell as well as visiting stints at The University of British Columbia, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Originally from New Jersey, Thaler attended Case Western Reserve University where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1967. Soon after, he attended the University of Rochester where he received a master’s degree in 1970 and a PhD in 1974. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1995.

Eric Zwick studies the interaction between public policy and corporate behavior, with a focus on fiscal stimulus, taxation and housing policy. His research draws insights from finance and behavioral economics while using a variety of methods: new data, natural experiments, theory and anecdotal exploration.

Zwick is particularly interested in the problems that small and medium-sized private firms and new ventures face, from the perspective of owners, investors, managers and workers. A secondary area of interest concerns the role of bounded rationality and imperfect information in the design of policies that promote behavior change. This work focuses on determinants of habit formation in health and workforce productivity settings.

Zwick earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in business economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics and mathematics with high honors from Swarthmore College. Prior to grad school, he worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as a web and software developer for several start-ups and non-profits.