Dear Friends of the Department,
Welcome to our 2025 autumn newsletter! We are pleased to update you on our latest news and invite you to engage with us through our online publication and more.
This autumn semester, we would like to welcome new Assistant Professor Josh Higbee and Professor Ido Erev (75% Psychology and 25% Econ). Josh’s expertise is empirical IO and Ido’s is behavioral economics. We would also like to welcome new lecturer Meng Yu, and new Career Service Coordinator Jamie Cunningham. Our long-term Professor Dan Levin (economic theory and experimental economics) retired in the summer, after serving the department for 30 years. He became Professor Emeritus.
A former faculty member, Peter Howitt, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, for his pioneering research on creative destruction, which is the driving force of long-run economic growth. He held the University Chaired Professorship in Economics at Ohio State from 1996 to 2000. At Ohio State, he also served as editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the macroeconomics journal of the department. For more details, see news link.
There is also a piece of sad news. Professor Emeritus, Belton Fleisher, passed away in late November in Chicago. Belton joined the department in 1965 and retired in 2012, and his research fields are labor, development, and Chinese economy.
Since January, three of our faculty members have had their research papers newly accepted in the Top 5 journals in economics. Congratulations to Kyle Dempsey, Gabriel Mihalache, and Myles Wagner on their accomplishments! For more details, see publications link.
In November, Bruce Weinberg was installed as the Eric Byron Fix-Monda Endowed Chair Professor. Congratulations to Bruce! Other awards for our faculty include Bruce Weinberg and his team received a new
$10M grant from the NSF to expand their ongoing Industries of Ideas project. Meta Brown and Bruce Weinberg and their colleagues received $1.3M from the NSF. Alex Hollingsworth has received the “Quality of Research Discovery” award from the AAEA. Bruce Weinberg’s study was featured in Ohio State News: “Change your location to jumpstart creativity,” and John Kagel was featured in WalletHub's recent article: “Cheap Car Insurance in Ohio.”
In August, Meta Brown and Ethan Doetsch won the inaugural departmental undergraduate teaching award, and Yaron Azrieli won the inaugural departmental graduate teaching/advising award. Congratulations to all of them!
Other AY 2025-2026 award winners include the following graduate students: Youngjae Jeong and Bill Wang have been awarded the G.S. Maddala Prize. The Maddala prize was established in 1999 to honor Dr. Maddala’s work in the field of econometrics, which recognizes graduate students for excellence in quantitative research using econometrics. Sooa Ahn and Bobby Daniel have been awarded the Tom Kniesner and Debbie Freund Award, which recognizes graduate students for their high-quality research in econometrics or health economics. Sooa Ahn, Sunmin Kim and Vaasavi Unnava have been awarded the Larry and Shelia Kantor Awardin recognition of their service to the graduate student population in the department. Sangdong Kim and Jiani Liu have been awarded the L. Edwin Smart Award. Finally, Gokce Dogan and Youngjae Jeong received the Departmental Graduate Associate Teaching Awards (GATA).
Finally, the department will move from Arps Hall to Bricker Hall, which is located in the center of the campus! The planned moving date is the summer of 2026. We are very excited about this move!
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT:
Undergraduate student, Ryan Mahoney (LinkedIn), is a Junior majoring in Economics and Political Science with minors in History and Mathematics. He is currently a tutor in the Economics Learning Center, the President of Omicron Delta Epsilon Economics Honors Society at Ohio State and holds two research assistant positions in the Political Science Department.
ALUMNI HIGHLIGHTS:
Elen Costigan received her BA/BS in Economics, Political Science, and Spanish Literature from Ohio State in 2007 and recently finished her Doctorate in Public Health from Columbia University, where she is currently a Research Advisor and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Policy.
Omer Meisel graduated with a BA in Economics and a minor in English from Ohio State in 1993. He is currently Executive Vice President of the National Cause and Financial Crimes Detection Program at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, a US federal agency).
We also feature a story about our Economics Advisory Board.
We hope that you will enjoy reading our newsletter. And as always, we encourage you to consider donating funds to help support our departmental activities or serve as a mentor for a current Economics student. Please also follow the department’s LinkedIn page.
We want to hear from you! Please update us on your career and personal accomplishments. We look forward to including some brief alumni updates in our next newsletter.
College of Arts and Sciences - Department of Economics
410 Arps Hall
1945 N High St, Columbus, OH 43210