Department Hires Two New Assistant Professors

Lesley Turner is a PhD candidate at Columbia University specializing in Public Economics. Her job market paper is on the incidence of student federal aid. Other completed projects include papers on teacher incentive pay programs and school accountability measures. Luminita Stevens is also a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in macroeconomics. Her dissertation examines the nature of price stickiness. She shows that grocery store prices in the US are characterized by pricing "regimes", in which firms alternate among a limited set of prices (such as a regular price and a sales price) for substantial periods of time. Her paper shows how costs of processing information explain why such pricing regimes might exist.