Press Releases Chicago Booth economist named 2017 Sloan Research Fellow

The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has selected Joseph S. Vavra, associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, to receive a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship.

Sloan fellowships recognize exceptional young researchers in physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience. Each fellow is awarded a $60,000, two-year grant to conduct research.

“I’m honored and excited to receive the Sloan research Fellowship,” Vavra says. “It suggests that the profession finds my work promising and interesting, and is highly encouraging.”

In the past ten years, Chicago Booth faculty have been awarded 11 out of 18 Sloan Fellowships in economics granted --more than any other business school or economics department in the country.

A macroeconomist, Vavra studies monetary economics, labor, and computational economics, as well as the ways durable consumption responds to stimulus, and how prices respond to exchange rate movements. His current research argues that monetary policy is less effective during volatile recessions. His recent papers include Regional Heterogeneity and Monetary Policy, coauthored with Erik Hurst, Martin Beraja, Andreas Fuster, which finds that the Federal Reserve’s move to pump money into the economy provided the least amount of stimulus to the areas hit hardest by the recession.

A member of the Chicago Booth faculty since 2012, Vavra also is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He earned his Ph.D., M.Phil. and M.A. degrees in economics from Yale University, and his B.A. in math, mathematical economic analysis, and statistics from Rice University.