Faculty and Staff

Mark Kanazawa (Ph.D. Stanford) regularly teaches courses in environmental and natural resource economics, economics of sports, econometrics, and research methods in environmental studies.  He has published research in the areas of American economic history, law and economics, new institutional economics, water policy, economics of sports, climate change, and the economics of natural resources.  His book Golden Rules, which examined water rights in the California Gold Rush, was published in 2015 by University of Chicago Press.  He has also written two textbooks, on research methods in environmental studies(2017) and environmental and natural resource economics(forthcoming), both published by Routledge Press.  His current research projects include groundwater management in California, a broad-sweep legal-economic history of groundwater law, and occupational licensing during the Progressive Era.  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.

Victor Leão Borges de Almeida (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) teaches Principles of Macroeconomics, Economy of Latin America, and History and Theory of Financial Crises. His research focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics, with emphasis on the challenges that emerging markets face during sovereign debt crises and renegotiation efforts. Before joining Carleton, he held teaching positions at the University of Minnesota and research positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the International Monetary Fund. In the summer, he enjoys staying active and outside, mainly by playing soccer and biking. In the winter, movies and TV series are his main ally.

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.

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.

Denise Hare (Ph.D. Standford University) is the SIT Investment Visiting Professor of Asian Policy in the Economics Department at Carleton College for fall term 2021.  More generally, she holds the Dr. Lester B. Lave Professor of Economics chair at Reed College. Her research examines economic development in China and Vietnam, addressing questions about labor markets, gender, rural industry, privatization and property rights, local public finance, and food security policy. Current work explores China’s vocational education and training programs, focusing on their curricular structure and the labor market returns to program graduates.

Denise received her B.A. from Carleton College, in 1983, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, in 1992.  From 1995 to 1997, she held a Postdoctoral Fellow position in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. In 2000 and 2001, she held a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship at Vietnam National University. In 2008 she was an Institute for International Research Fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center of Nanjing University. Her work also has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, and the Pew Foundation. From 2002 to 2015 she served as an instructor and research mentor in the Chinese Women Economists’ Network hosted by the China Center for Economic Research at Beijing University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yingtong Xie (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin – Madison) teaches courses on Macroeconomics and Financial Economics. Her first line of research interest centers on household finance side of macroeconomics. Her current research project studies how different retirement plans affect households’ portfolio choices and their risk exposure to the market over the life cycle. She is starting a research agenda on financial intermediation (e.g. FinTech firms) and its impact on the economy and household welfare. She also does research related to the shadow sector in developing countries and its interactions with business cycles. In her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, hanging out with her collie Roxy, and playing the bagpipe.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.