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Economics

Faculty and Staff

Chair | Faculty | Emeriti Faculty | Staff |

Chair

Photo of Mark Kanazawa
Mark Kanazawa Bio
Chair of Economics
Wadsworth A. Williams Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 308
Phone: 507 222 4106
Email: mkanazaw@carleton.edu

Mark Kanazawa (Ph.D. Stanford) has published research in the areas of American economic history, law and economics, new institutional economics, water policy, economics of sports, and the economics of natural resources.  Golden Rules, his recently-completed book on water rights in the California Gold Rush, will be published in early 2015 by University of Chicago Press.  His current research projects include a legal-economic history of groundwater rights in California, the impact of advances in science on the common law, the emigrant experience on the overland trail to California, and climate change impacts on communities along the north shore of Minnesota.  He has held visiting positions at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Illinois, and he has been awarded the Jacobs Fellowship at the Huntington Library and the Simon Fellowship at the Property and Environment Research Center.  He teaches courses in environmental and natural resource economics, western economic history, economics of sports, econometrics, and research methods in environmental studies.

Faculty

Photo of Yaniv Ben-Ami
Yaniv Ben-Ami Profile
Assistant Professor of Economics
Office: Hoppin House 206
Phone: 507 222 4030
Email: ybenami@carleton.edu

Yaniv Ben-Ami (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches Principles of Macroeconomics and Intermediate Macroeconomics. He studies the macroeconomics of financial crises with new theory and computation. He is particularly interested in the mechanics of how leverage amplifies economic fluctuations and the complicated relation that it fosters between beliefs and reality. In his free time he enjoys origami, board games and letterboxing.

Photo of Faress Bhuiyan
Faress Bhuiyan Profile
Associate Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 320
Phone: 507 222 4395
Email: fbhuiyan@carleton.edu

Faress Bhuiyan (Ph.D. Northwestern University) studies labor supply trends, subjective wellbeing, rural-urban migration in developing countries, economic growth and income inequality as it relates to peer based comparison utility. He is also interested in the welfare consequence of bargaining between special interest groups and the government towards choosing patent regimes in a global setting.  Bhuiyan enjoys teaching microeconomics of developing countries, labor economics, and comparative economic systems.  A huge fan of the Bangladesh cricket team, the Argentine soccer team, Barcelona FC and mainstream music, he loves playing soccer, cricket, ping pong and listening to music.

Photo of Jenny Bourne
Jenny Bourne Profile
Raymond Plank Professor of Incentive Economics
Office: Willis Hall 315
Phone: 507 222 4007
Email: jbourne@carleton.edu

Jenny Bourne (Ph.D. University of Chicago) has previously held positions at St. Olaf College, George Mason University, and the U.S. Treasury Department. She has published in the areas of American economic history, demography, tax policy, and law. Her book on the economics of slave law was published by Cambridge University Press; her book on the economic history of the Grange movement was published in January 2017 by Ohio University Press.  Her current research includes an analysis of wealth concentration and returns to capital across wealth groups, an investigation of taxes paid across wealth groups, the effects of the Civil War on the postbellum economy, and the impact of Civil-War finance on financial and governmental institutions.  Jenny is a member of the Statistics of Income Consultants’ Panel at the Internal Revenue Service and she served on the Tax Expenditure Review Study Group for the State of Minnesota (2010-11). She teaches courses in labor economics, law and economics, American economic history, economics of race, public finance, price theory, and microeconomic principles.

Photo of Nathan Grawe
Nathan Grawe Bio
Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences
Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 304
Phone: 507 222 5239
Email: ngrawe@carleton.edu

Nathan Grawe (Ph.D. University of Chicago) primarily teaches Economics of Inequality, Industrial Organization, Labor Economics, and Principles of Microeconomics.  Occasionally he also teaches Econometrics and Intermediate Macroeconomics. His research interests focus on the role of family in perpetuating inequality. Past publications study the correlation between parent and child income and the “family size effect” (why children from large families, on average, earn less than those from small families).  He is currently exploring the effects of recent demographic changes on the future demand for higher education.  Nathan was faculty director of the Cambridge program in Summer 2014.

Photo of Michael Hemesath
Michael Hemesath Profile
Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 303
Phone: 507 222 4105
Email: mhemesath@carleton.edu

Michael Hemesath (Ph.D. Harvard University) has held teaching positions at Tufts University in Medford, MA and in Kyiv, Ukraine and Krasnodar, Russia.  He joined the faculty at Carleton in 1989, left to serve as President of Saint John’s University in Collegeville, MN from 2012-2019, and returned to Carleton in 2020.

His economic interests include international economics, healthcare economics, the economics of higher education, and transition and post-Soviet economics.  He has taught Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, International Trade, International Finance, Soviet and Post-Soviet Economics and Healthcare Economics.  He has directed the Economics Department’s Cambridge program seven times and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Russia program three times.

Photo of Jonathan Lafky
Jonathan Lafky Bio
Assistant Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 321
Phone: 507 222 4103
Email: jlafky@carleton.edu

Jonathan Lafky (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh) teaches Experimental and Behavioral Economics, Game Theory, and Principles of Microeconomics. His research focuses primarily on the economics of internet rating systems, as well as how groups of people cooperate and coordinate their behavior over time. He enjoys salt licorice, running and baking bread.

Photo of Prathi Seneviratne
Prathi Seneviratne Profile
Associate Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 307
Phone: 507 222 4119
Email: pseneviratne@carleton.edu

Prathi Seneviratne (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) teaches international trade, international finance, and microeconomics. Her current research explores the impact of international competition on labor markets and human capital investment. She is particularly interested in the sources of rising inequality in developing countries that liberalized trade. In her spare time, she enjoys Argentine tango, ballroom dancing, yoga, and watching old British comedies on Netflix.

Photo of Eduard Storm
Eduard Storm Bio
Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics
Office: Willis Hall 309
Email: estorm@carleton.edu

Eduard Storm (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020) teaches courses on Macroeconomics, International and Labor Economics. His research interests focus on the role of job tasks and their responses to technological change. By enhancing our understanding of skills he hopes this will help Economists to get a better idea about how human capital investments translate into wage differences. Currently, Eduard is researching gains from specialization at the workplace and their contributions to income inequality between and within groups of workers. In his spare time, he enjoys watching and doing sports, improving his culinary art, and reading about anything and everything. In Summer, he can’t wait to get on his bike and just pedal towards the sun. Not a fan of Winter, though.

Photo of Ethan Struby
Ethan Struby Bio
Assistant Professor of Economics
Off Campus: Spring 2021, Winter 2021
Email Ethan Struby Contact details for Ethan Struby(requires login)

Ethan Struby (Ph.D., Boston College) teaches courses related to macroeconomics.  His research focuses on how economic agents form expectations about macroeconomic and financial fundamentals from prices and other public information, and on strategic motives in information selection.  In his free time, he enjoys playing excessively complicated board games and teaching himself the mandolin.

Photo of Aaron Swoboda
Aaron Swoboda ’01 Profile
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Economics
Off Campus: Spring 2021, Winter 2021
Office: Willis Hall 314
Phone: 507 222 5784
Email: aswoboda@carleton.edu

Aaron Swoboda, ’01 Econ (Ph.D. Univ. of California-Berkeley) has a joint appointment with Carleton’s Environmental Studies (ENTS) Program. He regularly teaches courses in environmental and natural resource economics, microeconomics, econometrics and policy analysis. His research explores the impacts of housing and land-use regulation using the tools of Geographic Information Systems and spatial econometrics. His research interests include the spatial analysis of land use policy, homebrewing and fly fishing.

Emeriti Faculty

Photo of Stephen Lewis
Stephen Lewis
Professor of Economics, Emeritus and President, Emeritus
Phone: 507 222 4109
Email: slewis@carleton.edu

Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. (Ph.D. Stanford) was President of Carleton from 1987 to 2002. A development economist interested in fiscal, monetary and trade policy, he lived and worked in Pakistan (1963-65), Kenya (1971-73), and Botswana (1977-78, 1980-82) and has been a consultant in several other countries. He’s published six books and numerous articles on economic development. Since retiring from Carleton, he has served on several corporate and non-profit boards and continues to write and consult. View his home page.

Photo of Martha Paas
Martha Paas Profile
Wadsworth A. Williams Professor of Economics, Emerita
Phone: 507 222 4109
Email: mpaas@carleton.edu

Martha Paas (Ph.D. Bryn Mawr), Wadsworth A. Williams Professor of Economics, is a macroeconomist with special interests in European economic history and Health care economics. She has lectured and written widely on the economic history of early modern Germany and on income inequality and health care reform. Martha has a new book with Yale University Press: The  Kipper and Wipper Inflation, 1619-23:An Economic History with Contemporary Broadsheets. She has held several grants and fellowships, most recently a Senior Research Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Martha is the architect of the annual Carleton Seminar in Economics held at Cambridge University, England, which she began in 1983. She has been a member of High Table at King’s College, Cambridge.

See Martha Paas Retirement Page

Photo of Stephen Strand
Stephen Strand
Raymond Plank Professor of Incentive Economics, Emeritus
Phone: 507 222 4109
Email: sstrand@carleton.edu

Stephen Strand (Ph.D., Vanderbilt) came to economics after a stint in the Peace Corps in Turkey and regularly teaches a course on the economics of the European Union.  He also teaches courses in managerial economics and other applied microeconomics topics including regulatory economics, a topic on which he has published several articles and done consulting and research.  He has also co-directed Carleton off campus studies programs in France, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey, in addition to the Carleton Economics Department’s Cambridge Program in the summer of 2012.  In 2013-2014, he participated as a visiting professor in an off campus studies program organized by Georgetown University at the McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies in Alanya, Turkey.

Photo of Robert Will
Robert Will ’50
Raymond Plank Professor of Incentive Economics, Emeritus
Phone: 507 222 4109

Robert E. Will (Ph.D. Yale University) became an Economics Department legend during his 36 years (1957-1993) on the Carleton faculty. A Carleton grad himself (Class of 1950), Bob championed the importance of a liberal arts education. Each year the Robert E. Will Economics Prize, created to honor Bob’s service, is awarded to the senior economics major or majors who demonstrate excellent academic achievement and breadth of intellectual interests in the best tradition of a liberal arts education. Bob remains a resident of Northfield and is very involved in community activities.

Staff

Photo of Bruce Dalgaard
Bruce Dalgaard
Visiting Scholar in Economics
Office: Willis Hall 215
Phone: 507 222 5378
Email: bdalgaard@carleton.edu

Bruce Dalgaard ((Ph.D., Illinois) has held teaching positions at Lehigh University, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and, most recently, St. Olaf College.  He’s also had international appointments at Chiba University (Fulbright Scholar) and Waseda University (ACM Japan Study Director), HES in Rotterdam, and the Norwegian School of Economics.  His scholarly activity is varied, ranging from an AER article on computer-assisted instruction, to numerous economic and financial history books and articles, to a college-level money & banking textbook.  Currently he is actively researching the interplay of entrepreneurship and religion in Norway’s early modern period.  You will often find him walking his dog in the Arb.  He also enjoys sports and is eager to attend athletic events on campus.

Photo of Sara Nielsen
Sara Nielsen Bio
Administrative Assistant in Economics
Proctor
Office: Willis Hall 305
Phone: 507 222 4109
Email: snielsen@carleton.edu

Sara Nielsen joined the Economics Dept as an Administrative Assistant in August, 2012.  Before working at Carleton she was a legal secretary/assistant for the United State District Court of MN and at a law firm, and more recently worked substituting as an office assistant and special educational assistant for the Northfield Public Schools.  Sara and her husband Tom have 3 children.  Sara enjoys time with family and friends, traveling, gardening, cooking, baking and golfing.

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Econ Course List Winter 2021

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Carleton College Department of Economics

Department Chair: Mark Kanazawa
Administrative Assistant: Sara Nielsen
Phone: 507-222-4109
Economics pages maintained by Sara Nielsen
This page was last updated on 8 January 2021
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