LEVY INSTITUTE ALUMNI/AE NEWSLETTER | |
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Dear Alumnae,
Welcome to the first edition of the Levy Institute Alumni Newsletter. As you are no doubt aware, I have been serving as the new Director of the Levy Economics Institute’s Graduate Programs since our Spring 2022 Commencement. Among the initiatives I have been working on is an effort to reach out to our growing community of graduates, as your ranks have grown quite a bit over the past nine years since the program was founded. This newsletter is meant to help us stay in touch and keep you informed about what is happening at the Institute and with some of your fellow graduates.
Last year we were able to hire a new Graduate Recruiter and Assistant (more on Carlton Rounds, below), to help support and grow the student body. Since Carlton joined us, we have been undertaking an overhaul of our admissions recruitment approach and process, so you may have seen some changes on the program website and in our general online presence. The latter has been greatly enhanced by the addition of a new editor at the Institute (more on Lindsey Carter, below, as well), who has also taken up the management of the website and, along with Carlton and the fine people at Bard Web Services, redesigned the Graduate Program website.
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We have a great group of students with us this year, with one new MS student and seven MA students joining us, as well as eight returning students. Of these, eight students have arrived from Afghanistan by way of Bishkek, where they have been studying online with us while awaiting their refugee status to be resolved.
It is an exciting time for the state of heterodox economics education more generally. The scale and scope of the various crises ongoing in the US and around the world—alongside the increasingly obvious irrelevance of many mainstream diagnoses and prescriptions—reaffirms the need for the kinds of economic analysis that the Levy Economics Institute consistently provides, as well as the need to train the next generation of economists to face the policy challenges that these crises present. I feel more hopeful knowing that you all are out in the world armed with the tools that you learned while studying with us at the Levy Economics Institute in addition to the commitment to and passion for progressive change in the economic, political, social, and cultural structures that have produced the situation in which we find ourselves at this moment. And I am grateful for the opportunity to continue increasing the number of Levy alumnae.
In solidarity,
Thomas Masterson
P.S. We would love to know what you are up to! Please send updates to [email protected].
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Last fall, the Levy Institute hosted a workshop entitled “Gender Inequalities and Economic Theory and Policies for a Post-Pandemic World.” We were joined by scholars from around the world, including researchers and policy advocates we have been collaborating with in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, South Africa, and Tanzania. I taught a capacity building workshop in March in Accra, Ghana for a group of eighteen researchers from throughout sub-Saharan Africa These workshops were part of an ongoing research program on gender inequality funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that centers the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty.
In May, we held the 30th Annual Levy Economics Institute Conference, which was an online event that covered topics in unemployment and job creation, inflation, climate change and fiscal/monetary policy, and the US macro situation. If you missed it, you can watch the proceedings here.
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The macromodeling team completed strategic analyses for Greece and the United States—examining in the latter case how the US was able to achieve such a swift recovery, and, as always, revealing the persistent causes of structural vulnerability for the US economy. L. Randall Wray and Yeva Nersisyan analyzed the sources of rising prices in the US economy, concluding that tighter monetary policy would not be an effective remedy. In a related vein, Dimitri Papadimitriou and Wray returned to a set of themes they have touched on in the past, arguing that both the orthodox accounts of inflation and the preferred monetary policy options that accompany those theories require significant revision.
The Distribution of Income and Wealth program wrapped up work on a year-long project to build a model for the Bureau of Labor Statistics that incorporates household production into a measure of consumption (as opposed to consumption expenditures). This is one of the results of the years of work the program has devoted to analyzing time use data and incorporating the value of household production into the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being (LIMEW) and the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income/Consumption Poverty (LIMTIP/LIMTCP).
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Carlton Rounds (he/him) joins us as Graduate Admissions Officer and Assistant to the Director of Graduate Programs. Carlton has worked as an educator, service leader, and rights navigator, and served as a recruiter for programs in Bard’s Institute for International Liberal Education.
Lindsey Carter (she/they) is our new Editor and Digital Content Coordinator. Lindsey, a graduate of William & Mary, has worked as an editor and in research and communications for the private sector and think tanks; most recently, she ran social media for the Center for American Progress’s program on LGBTQ issues.
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Giuliano Toshiro Yajima (he/him)
Giuliano joined the Levy Institute last winter as a member of the Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team and a coauthor of our Strategic Analysis reports. His research focuses on macroeconomic theory and policy, growth and income distribution, structural change and patterns of innovation, international financial instability, and ecological economics.
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Aashima Sinha (she/her)
Aashima has just joined the Institute as a research scholar in the Gender Equality and the Economy Program. Her research interests span the fields of feminist, development, and labor economics. Currently, her research focuses on the micro- and macroeconomic implications of social reproduction. She investigates the gender-differentiated effects of unpaid care work time on the well-being outcomes of care providers in low- and middle-income countries.
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Thanks to some interested alumni reaching out to us with the desire to be better connected, we have now launched a Levy Graduate Alumni/ae Group on LinkedIn. You will find sign up simple and easy if you go to the program page and look on the left side of the screen where "groups" are listed and select the link, or you may go to the page directly here.
This group allows everyone to contribute and from time to time you may see updates, newsletters, and requests from the graduate programs for outreach and recruitment support. We are working to expand awareness of our programs as well as highlight our graduates. Please share this!
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“Levy continues to shape my thinking and work in a myriad of ways, especially as it relates to translating the implications of economic theory and practice in people’s material lives. I’m also quite fond of the time I spent at the Institute, most notably regularly stopping by Liz Dunn’s office and taking classes with Martha, Fernando, Ajit, and Tom. I hold on dearly to the things they’ve taught me.”
–Marokey Sawo (MS'20)
Marokey Sawo (she/her) is currently a research associate at the Urban Institute and has been working in the DC research and policy space since graduating from Levy. Her research centers on questions of income and wealth distribution as they relate to gender, race, and economic policy. Before joining Urban, Sawo was an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, where she conducted research at the national and state levels on the economic consequences of racism and misogyny. Sawo was also previously a researcher at the Groundwork Collaborative, where she focused on the economics of anti-austerity at the federal level, varying unemployment insurance issues, and broader labor market conditions.
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"The Levy program offered a systematic emancipation from conventional ideas and paradigms, which I believe has provided me a fertile foundation on which to develop new ideas. Small classes and close relationships have left me identifying Levy as my intellectual home."
–Nitin Nair (MS'23)
Nitin Nair (he/him) graduated from the M.S. program in Spring 2023. This Fall, he will enter the PhD program at the University of Leeds, where he was awarded the 2023/24 Leeds University Business School Economics Department Scholarship, and will work with Karsten Kohler, Annina Kaltenbrunner, and Gary Dymski.
Nitin recently published two pieces in the Levy Institute’s working paper series—“When Minsky and Godley Met Structuralism: A Stock-Flow Consistent Approach to the Currency Hierarchy,” based off of his Master’s thesis, and “Unconventional Monetary Policy or Automatic Stabilizers? A Financial Post-Keynesian Comparison”—and the former earned him the Herbert Simon Prize, awarded annually by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for the best conference paper by a young economics scholar.
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