Department of Economics

Professor Wolpin has been at Penn since 1995. His research focuses on the labor market and demographic decisions of households and individuals in dynamic settings. In recent work, he has studied (i) the role of public welfare and marriage markets in accounting for race differences in education, marriage, fertility and labor supply of women; (ii) the importance of technological change in explaining the increase in the college premium and in the male-female wage gap; (iii) the effect of borrowing constraints on college attendance and (iv) the importance of home inputs in accounting for race differences in cognitive achievement. The methodological approach he has adopted recognizes the critical interplay between economic theory, data and econometrics.

Professor Todd is also a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center. She serves as an Associate Editor for the American Economic Review and the Journal of Human Capital.

Her main fields of research are social program evaluation, labor economics, and microeconometrics. She has published papers on the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial wage disparities, and methods for evaluating and optimally designing conditional cash transfer programs.

She is currently working on implementing a large-scale randomized school incentive program in Mexican high schools, on analyzing the effects of school vouchers in Chile and on assessing the effects of government regulation on the operation of the privatized pension market in Chile.

Professor Tang’s received his PhD from Northwestern University and has taught here at Penn since 2008. His research focuses on the robust econometric inference of economic models about agents’ behavior in environments with or without strategic interactions. Empirical researchers are mainly interested in two (logically sequential) questions as they try to link economic models with observed data. First, does the theoretical model imply any restrictions on agents’ behavior observable to empirical researchers? Second, given data consistent with a certain class of models, can researchers use the observed data alone to fully recover the unknown primitives of the model? Answers to the first question shed lights on the falsifiability (testability) of an economic model, and help researchers decide whether a certain model is fit for explaining the observed data and predicting future outcomes. Answers to the second question are important if researchers are interested in backing out the unknown structural parameters for the purposing of inferring counterfactual policy implications. A unifying theme of his research is to address these two questions for various economic models while trying to employ as few exogenous form restrictions on model primitives as possible.

Professor Schorfheide is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and has been a Visiting Scholar at several central banks. He serves as an Associate Editor for Econometrica, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and Quantitative Economics.

Professor Schorfheide conducts research in econometrics and macroeconomics. Much of his econometric works has focused on the problem of model evaluation and selection in situations in which some or all models under consideration are potentially misspecified. This research is motivated by the need for econometric methods that are suitable to analyze modern macroeconomic models, such as dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models.  His research provides a set of tools that are useful for empirical work with modern macroeconomic models, including forecasting and policy analysis. He applied these methods to analyze the sources of business cycle fluctuations and to study the effects of monetary policy. (See the Research section of his personal page for detailed information.)

Schorfheide currently advises various regional Federal Reserve Banks in regard to the use of DSGE models and Vector Autoregressions for forecasting and policy analysis.

Professor de Paula received his PhD from Princeton University and has taught here at Penn since 2005. He is also a research associate at Penn’s Population Studies Center. He is an applied econometrician with strong interests in both empirical applications and methodological questions. His research is on the intersection of applied economic theory, econometrics and empirical microeconomics, with particular emphasis on issues that arise as one attempts to take policy-relevant economic models to data. The questions he investigates are either related to methodological aspects (identification and estimation, especially in duration and empirical games models) or empirical applications around microeconomic environments (mostly in problems found in developing nations such as tax avoidance, undocumented migration and the relation between sexual behavior and AIDS).

Professor Diebold is also Co-Director of the Financial Institutions Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and President of the Society for Financial Econometrics. He has published extensively in econometrics, forecasting, finance and macroeconomics, and he has served on the editorial boards of numerous leading journals. He is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Statistical Association, and the recipient of Sloan, Guggenheim, and Humboldt fellowships. He is a founding member of the Oliver Wyman Institute, a cooperative undertaking between Oliver Wyman and the international academic community, whose mission is to facilitate and accelerate knowledge transfer between academia and the financial services industry. Diebold lectures actively, worldwide, and has received several prizes for outstanding teaching. He has held visiting appointments in Economics and Finance at Princeton University, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, Johns Hopkins University, and New York University. During 1986-1989 he served as an economist under Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington DC, and during 2007-2008 he served as an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. He received his B.S. from the Wharton School in 1981 and his Ph.D. in 1986, also from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Cheng received her PhD from Yale University and has been here at Penn since 2009 where she also serves as the undergraduate major advisor. Her research interests include econometric theory and applied econometrics.