Student Standouts at Econ Conference

Wanyi Li ’12 (Shanghai) and Qianyi Yang ’12 (Nanjing, China) recently presented their honors theses research at Georgetown University’s prestigious Carroll Round economics conference.

Li was given the conference’s Outstanding Young Economist award for her presentation, Does School Quality Affect Real Estate Prices? The Effect of Top Tier Elementary Schools on Property Prices in Shanghai.

Yang’s research was titled U.S. Monetary Policy Announcements and Foreign Exchange Market Behavior. Both students are dual majors in economics and applied mathematics and statistics.

“Having two students accepted really says something about the economics education and research at Macalester.”

“The conference is very competitive and attendees are normally from the best colleges in the world,” says economics professor Liang Ding. “Having two students accepted really says something about the economics education and research at Macalester.”

“Bringing their knowledge in math and statistics to explore problems in economics illustrates the beauty of the interdisciplinary work we promote at Macalester,” adds Karen Saxe, chair of the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Department.

In addition to presenting their papers, Li and Yang interacted with world-renowned economists such as Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, and Jonathan Levin, economics department chair at Stanford.

The conference, according to Georgetown’s website, seeks to encourage “an informed and productive dialogue about global economic issues by bringing together participants and prominent members of the academic and policymaking communities.” Participating students come from such schools as Harvard, Columbia, and Brown, and from as far away as Oxford University and the University of Bern in Switzerland.