The Maloof Fellowship

The Maloof Fellowships are funded by the generosity of Edmond D. Villani and the Frederic and Agnes Maloof Foundation. The fellowships support one or more doctoral students in Economics at Georgetown University, particularly students of Lebanese or more broadly Arabic/Middle Eastern descent. 

2024-2025

• Joseph Hanna
  
  Joseph is an international economist with interests in global value chains and policy uncertainty. His dissertation uses theory and empirics to study how tariffs enacted during the US-China trade war impacted US industries through their buyer-supplier relationships. Joseph also researches how financial markets react to policy uncertainty by using high frequency data and the Brexit referendum as a case study.
• Yagmur Menzilcioglu
  
  Yagmur is a macroeconomist with research interests at the intersection of climate change, environmental and energy economics, public economics, and industrial organization. In her dissertation, she studies the design of climate change policies and their distributional consequences, including market-based carbon policies across heterogeneous firms in concentrated industries and costly low-carbon technology adoption subsidies across heterogeneous consumers.

2023-2024

• Lina Alami
  
  Lina is a first year PhD student. Her first line of interest is the use of micro-econometric methods to estimate the returns to structural reforms, by incorporating social and institutional factors such as expectations and political incentives. Her second line of interest is the use of experimental games and social networks to study forms of collective action. This derives from her research on the impact of ICT network penetration on the probability of protest activity in the MENA region during the Arab Spring. 

2022-2023

• Farah Hani
  
  Farah is a first year PhD student. Her research, as a Fellow at the Center for International Development, included analyzing the performance of fiscal policy in Jordan, and using micro-data to characterize labor supply and demand in Saudi Arabia. She also co-authored a paper on the economics of international migration reviewing the micro- and macro-evidence on cross-country wage differentials.

2021-2022

• Peter Caradonna
  
  Peter is a microeconomic theorist whose interests include decision theory, industrial organization, and mechanism design. Peter’s research lies at the intersection of decision theory and econometrics. His dissertation develops a general and widely-applicable class of statistical tests for various models of individual and aggregate behavior. In his work in industrial organization, Peter and his coauthors develop a unified framework for analyzing entry in the context of merger review.

• Rodmiro Rodrigo
  
  Rodimiro’s research is at the intersection of macroeconomics, labor economics, firm dynamics and international trade. He uses micro-data to estimate macroeconomic models and derive policy implications. Rodimiro studies the effects of automation on firms and workers. In his dissertation he uncovers the labor reorganization process that occurs within firms once they adopt industrial robots and uses that costly process to understand the productivity paradox of technology.

2020-2021

• Maria Hernandez de Benito
  
  Maria’s fields of interest include applied microeconomics and development economics. Her current research studies the effects of violent crime on intra-household resource allocations and marriage markets. During her PhD, she conducted field work in Tanzania to study women’s land rights. Her dissertation also explores the effect of children’s gender composition on family structure, and the role of social norms as barriers to gender equality.

• Juan Margitic
  
  Juan’s fields of interest include political economy, development economics, and public economics. His research combines theory and empirical analysis to answer policy-oriented questions on topics such as voting, redistribution, and poverty. One chapter of Juan’s dissertation investigates the causal impact of distance to a polling location on turnout in the US.

2019-2020

• Becka Brolinson
  
  Becka’s fields of interest include environmental, public, and energy economics. Her research focuses on public policy questions such as how to efficiently price electricity and how to estimate the value of public transit. One part of Becka’s dissertation asks if a commonly used type of residential electricity pricing achieves its goals of encouraging conservation and helping low-income households.

• Madhulika Khanna
  
  Madhulika’s fields of interest include development economics and applied microeconomics. In her dissertation, she studies decisions that shape the process of human capital formation and explores how certain cultural contexts cause and sustain gender gaps in human development. Her current body of work explores a range of topics, including female education and health, marriage markets and children’s time use.

2018-2019

• Givi Melkadze
  
  Givi’s research is at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. He studies the effect of fluctuations in aggregate uncertainty on credit supply and its implications for real economic activity. Givi also studies the optimal design of government policies in times of heightened uncertainty. To this end, he applies both quantitative macroeconomic models and empirical analyses.

• Allison Stashko
  
  Allison’s fields of interest include public finance, political economy, and law and economics. Her research uses theory to inform empirical analysis of topics such as racial profiling, gerrymandering, and the politics of redistribution. Allison’s dissertation asks whether police maximize arrests or minimize crime, in an effort to better understand how to test for illegal discrimination. 

2017-2018

• Ammar Farooq
  
  Ammar Farooq’s dissertation explores the implications of heterogeneity in labor markets on aggregate productivity and the impact of public policy in improving labor market efficiency. In Ammar’s work, he borrows heavily from the literature on search models of the labor market where heterogeneity in the labor market impacts aggregate outcomes. Ammar also uses tools from the applied microeconomics literature to identify the effects of public policies on labor market efficiency. 

• ​Wenlan Luo
  
  Wenlan’s research focuses on the interaction between macroeconomic policy and household heterogeneity. Wenlan asks questions such as how the effects of monetary policy vary across households through credit extensions, how aggregate statistics reveal information on the determinants of top wealth inequality, and how redistributive motive affects optimal income taxation. Wenlan answers these questions both empirically and via quantitative structural models.