Three NUS economists made Fellows of prestigious Econometric Society
These three NUS Economics researchers were newly elected as Fellows of the prestigious Econometric Society
NUS economists Professor Satoru Takahashi, Distinguished Professor John Quah and Associate Professor Jessica Pan have been recently elected Fellows of The Econometric Society, a prestigious international society dedicated to promoting theoretical and quantitative approaches to economic research.
The trio are the latest to be elected from NUS Economics since Prof Chew Soo Hong in 2011 and its former Head Prof Parkash Chander in 2010. As Fellows, they join the ranks of other economic luminaries including former Chairs of the US Federal Reserve Dr Janet L. Yellen and Prof Ben S. Bernanke, as well as Nobel Prize laureate, psychologist-cum-economist Prof Daniel Kahneman.
One of the most prevalent economic research affiliations, The Econometric Society, founded in 1930, encourages open discourse on a range of issues through regular scientific meetings held worldwide. It also manages the publication of top tier journals Econometrica, Quantitative Economics, and Theoretical Economics.
Speaking on his research, Head of NUS Economics Prof Takahashi shared, “My work focuses on game theory, which aims to understand incentives and behaviour of players (consumers, firms, regulators, etc.) in the presence of strategic interactions with other players. In particular, I am interested in repeated games and games with incomplete information. Currently, my co-authors and I are investigating a so-called information design problem: how to best disseminate information to players, partly publicly and partly privately, so that they are incentivised to choose desired actions under asymmetric information among each other.”
Prof Quah’s research focuses on different areas of economic theory, including monotone comparative statics and revealed preference analysis. Monotone comparative statics is a mathematical technique that allows economists to study how a decision (such as a firm’s decision on its output) will change as relevant factors that could affect the decision changes, while revealed preference analysis tries to work out the empirical implications of economic models. Many important economic decisions, such as insurance and investment portfolio decisions, require people to decide on their exposure to risk. In recently published work in the area of revealed preference analysis, Prof Quah and his co-authors developed new techniques to test if investors behave in a way consistent with various economic theories of human behaviour in risky environments.
Much of applied microeconomist Assoc Prof Pan’s gender-related research is framed by one key question: Why have gender gaps in labour supply, earnings and representation in top jobs remain large and persistent despite the remarkable convergence in the economic roles of men and women and the reversal of the gender education gap in favour of women? Her recent work examines various constraints that women might face in attaining their full earnings potential. These include looking at persistent gender identity norms (e.g., “men should earn more than their wives”), and prejudice-based discrimination.
