Fellows

Eric Klemm is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UBC Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality. His research examines how technological progress, migration, and population aging shape firms’ decisions and workers’ labor market outcomes. He earned his PhD in Economics from University College London (UCL) in 2026. In 2027, he will join the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as an Assistant Professor in Management and Strategy.

Sarah Elven is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stone Center at UBC. Her research links climate change, environmental policy, and economic inequality, asking how policy can help to protect those most vulnerable to climate change, and how it can protect the environment without exacerbating inequality. Sarah’s current work considers the design of social protection systems to support communities exposed to climate-related shocks, and the economic and distributional impacts of land-use policies. Previous work asks how behaviorally-informed policies can lessen constraints to the transition to clean technologies in resource-constrained settings. Sarah has worked for the World Bank’s Research Group (Development Impact Evaluation) and in its Social Protection Unit, as well as at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and Oxford University. She holds a PhD in Environmental Economics from the London School of Economics, an MSc in Economics for Development from Oxford University, and an MA in Economics from the University of Edinburgh.

Anahita Karandikar is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research fields are behavioural and development economics, and her current two-pronged research agenda explores how social norms sustain economic inequality. In the first line of work, she uses field and lab-in-the-field experiments to study inequality within the household: why women are excluded from paid work and from financial decision-making, and whether flexible work arrangements and communication between spouses can narrow these gaps. The second uses large-scale survey data and natural experiments to study inequality across social groups, asking how occupational mobility shapes income and wealth inequality over the long run and whether economic and educational advancement influences caste-based discrimination. Anahita holds an MA in Economics from Ashoka University and a BA from Fergusson College, Pune, and was previously a research associate at the Behavioral Development Lab at J-PAL South Asia. She is a Director at Women in Econ/Policy, an India-based non-profit working to reduce the gender gap in economics and public policy.

Angel Espinoza is a is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research interests lie at the intersection of labor economics and international trade, with a particular focus on how these fields relate to income and wealth disparities. Angel is particularly interested in conducting research with clear implications for policy making. His current research agenda includes examining the distributional effects of minimum wages and rules of origin in trade agreements, analyzing the impact of union democratization in Mexico, and exploring the effects of trade-driven robot adoption on labor markets. He is also actively engaged in volunteer work, having founded ITAM Construye, an organization in Mexico dedicated to strengthening social cohesion through community service.

Carla Srebot Roeder is a PhD Candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research examines how labor market institutions influence inequality and worker mobility. Her current work investigates the roots of informality in a developing economy, focusing on how limited outside options and workplace amenities affect labor market power, the gender pay gap, and job mobility. More broadly, she studies how policies and the actions of workplace leaders can reshape labor markets and reduce gender disparities. Together, her projects highlight the interplay between informality, labor regulation, and managerial practices in shaping economic inequality.

Daniel Araújo is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research focuses on income inequality and intergenerational mobility, particularly emphasizing the dynamics of modern slavery and the long-term impacts of economic policies. Daniel has published in leading journals such as The Journal of Health Economics and The Journal of Development Economics. His work aims to understand the causes of economic disparities and inform policies promoting economic equity.

Daniel Guzmán is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research lies at the intersection of labour, macroeconomics, and public finance. His ongoing work examines how an increase in the value-added tax (VAT) on professional service purchases affects firms’ outsourcing decisions, as well as its broader equity and efficiency implications. He previously worked at the Central Bank of Chile and the Inter-American Development Bank. He holds an MA and a BSc in Economics from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); an MSc in Quantitative Finance; and BSc degrees in Economics and in International Trade & Finance from Universidad del Rosario.

Étienne Latulippe is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research studies how monetary policy is transmitted through the economy, both to macroeconomic aggregates such as prices, output and employment, and across the distribution of agents, and develops estimation techniques to reliably identify these effects. Before his PhD, he earned a B.Sc. in Economics from the Université de Montréal and an M.A. in Economics from Queen’s University and worked as a research assistant at the Bank of Canada.

Felipe Sepúlveda is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research lies at the intersection of urban, public, and environmental economics. Much of his work uses administrative data from Chile, combining structural and reduced-form methods. His job market paper uses Chile’s homebuyer subsidies to ask whether household location choices reflect preferences or binding constraints, a distinction that shapes how sorting and welfare are measured in housing markets. His work also includes estimating the housing supply elasticity and the pricing of water rights in Chile, as well as the determinants of home survival in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, among other projects. His earlier work on driving restrictions and congestion pricing in Bogotá was published in the Journal of the European Economic Association. He holds an MA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and before joining UBC he worked for five years at FK Economics on applied research and policy analysis.

Juan Miguel Jiménez is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, working at the intersection of political, environmental, and development economics. His dissertation studies how institutions governing land and natural resources shape inequality. It examines how Colombia’s post-conflict Land Restitution Program affects agricultural productivity and violence, and how political institutions and incentives shape environmental outcomes such as deforestation, water use, and air pollution. His work has been published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Evolution and Human Behavior. Before joining UBC, he earned a BA and MA in Economics and a law degree from Universidad de los Andes, and worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute and as a consultant for the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

Prerna Kundu is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research examines the determinants of wealth inequality, with a focus on land ownership and gender in India. She has built a novel dataset covering the universe of land records in an Indian state, with over 80 million owner records across 15 million plots. She studies how inheritance reform shaped daughters’ land ownership, and how family property rights evolve as highways raise land values. Through field experiments, she also studies norms around women’s mobility and how youth camps can build cohesion between religious groups. She is the co-founder of Women in Econ/Policy, an Indian nonprofit advancing mentorship and visibility for women in economics.

Ratzanyel Rincón is a PhD Candidate in Economics at UBC. His research focuses on studying how labour regulations and public policy affect inequality in the labour market. His current work examines the effects of union democratization, the interaction between wage subsidies and minimum wage policies, and immigrant entrepreneurship. He is also interested in causal inference methods. Before joining the Ph.D. program at UBC, Ratzanyel worked as an economist at Banco de México. He holds a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Instituto Politécnico Nacional and an M.A. in Economics from El Colegio de México.

Romina Quagliotti is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research interests are in labor economics. Some of her ongoing projects study the following questions: How do firms adjust employment, wages, hours and days worked in response to negative shocks? What are the long-term labor market impacts of trade disruptions? How does collective bargaining decentralization affect inequality? Before joining UBC, she obtained a B.A. in Economics from Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and worked as a Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant at UC Berkeley.

Sebastian Melo-Martin is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research explores how firms adjust to trade shocks and how these adjustments shape workers’ earnings inequality across developed and middle-income countries. Sebastian is currently working on understanding the role of labour market institutions, particularly unions, in mediating workers’ wage and employment responses to external demand shocks. His work also examines the spillover effects of major economic transformations, such as the expansion of the lithium sector in Chile, on connected firms and workers throughout production networks. Before joining UBC, he worked at the Chief Economist Office for Latin America and the Caribbean at The World Bank on labour and trade-related research projects. He studied at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

Uyseok Lee is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. His research explores how institutions, policies, and historical events affect the evolution of culture—the values, beliefs, and customs held in society—and how cultural change influences social and economic outcomes. In particular, he is interested in how family and childhood environments shape the development and transmission of cultural values across generations. Prior to his PhD, he was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He holds an MA in Economics and a Bachelor of International Economics from UBC.

Xiomara Pulido is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research explores how environmental policies and climate shocks shape income and wealth inequality. Her current projects include analyzing the impact of carbon taxes on firms’ decisions and the distributional effects on owners as well as high- and low-skill workers in Canada. She is also studying how temperature shocks affect educational outcomes, such as standardized test performance, access to higher education, and entry into the formal labor market, among students from different income backgrounds in Colombia. She previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and holds an MA and a BSc in Economics from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).

Yuting Chen is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research explores how values, beliefs, and social norms are shaped by economic conditions and how they contribute to inequality. Her main project uses the meanings of Chinese given names to measure cultural values and parental aspirations, and studies how they vary with socioeconomic status and change during economic modernization.”

Ziyuan Wang is a PhD candidate in Economics at UBC. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental, labour, and public economics, focusing on how institutions and policy shape distributional outcomes under environmental and economic risk. Her current work includes a study of how homeowner associations affect wildfire resilience in the United States, and a project examining how cap-and-trade carbon market affects firm behaviour and labour market inequality in Canada. Before UBC, she completed her Master’s at Duke University and her undergraduate degree at Beijing Normal University.

Khushi Shah is a Master’s student in Economics at UBC. Her research interests include applied microeconomics, economic history, and labour economics. Her Master’s thesis focuses on the long-run effects of historical racial exclusion and its implications for contemporary economic outcomes. Before joining UBC, she completed her Bachelor of Arts (Specialized Honours) in Economics at York University.

Kitty Wu is an MA Thesis student in Economics at UBC. Her research interests span industrial organization, behavioural economics, and public economics. Currently, she is completing her Master’s thesis, which examines competitive dynamics and consumer behaviour in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, with a focus on their implications for access and equity. Before joining UBC, Kitty completed her Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and gained professional experience in strategy consulting.

Jacob Morand is an MA Thesis student in Economics at UBC. His research interests are centred on environmental and labour economics. At the moment, he is completing his Master’s thesis, in which he analyses the effect of conscription policies on educational outcomes. Before becoming a student at UBC, he completed his Bachelor of Science in Economics at the Free University of Berlin, where he also gained research experience at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research.

Cam Donohoe is an MA student in Economics at UBC. He holds a joint BA in Economics and Political Science from Simon Fraser University. Prior to joining UBC, Cam spent two years as a Research Assistant on the Payments Policy and Strategy team at the Bank of Canada, where he contributed to research and policy work on the Canadian payments ecosystem, stablecoins, and tokenization. His current research interests focus on the extent to which stablecoins can alleviate frictions in cross-border payments and the implications for remittance markets.

Golrokh Eshtiaghi is an MA student in Economics at UBC whose research interests are labour markets and wealth concentration and income inequality within the entrepreneurial class. She completed her undergraduate degree double majoring in economics and international relations. Her research focused on the impact of technological change and labour market outcomes especially for younger cohorts and early-stage workers. She also worked as a research analyst for a non-profit that advocates for small business interests across provinces and territories in Canada.

Linda Nidal Sadeck is an MA student in Economics at UBC and a former Research Assistant in Financial Stability at the Bank of Canada. Her research studies the distributional effects of monetary policy, combining macroeconomic questions about who bears the costs of policy shocks with econometric methods for measuring how those effects differ across households. Her undergraduate thesis at Carleton University examined whether monetary tightening affects not only how much inflation households face but how often they must adjust their spending in response, a dimension of inequality that average-based measures can overlook. At UBC, she hopes to extend this work by exploring the welfare costs of these adjustments.

Tessa Peer is a Master’s student in Economics at UBC. Her research interests center on the rising cost of living and its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, particularly as economic pressures compound existing vulnerabilities. She is especially interested in how climate change intersects with these dynamics, exploring the ways environmental shocks and climate policies further shape affordability and inequality for these populations. Before coming to UBC she worked at the Bank of Canada. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, earning a BSc honours degree in Economics.  

Victoria Fernandes is a Master’s student in Economics at UBC. Her research interests centre on macroeconomics, financial economics and environmental economics, with a particular emphasis on inequality and distributional outcomes. She completed her undergraduate degrees at the University of Western Ontario with an Honours Specialization in Economics (Huron University College) and an Honours in Business Administration (Ivey Business School). Prior to joining the MA program, Victoria worked as a research assistant at the Bank of Canada, where she continues to be an external academic consultant.

Zane Williams is an M.A. student in Economics at UBC. Their research examines how environmental and social systems shape one another, particularly in the context of natural disasters and wealth inequality. They are currently researching the evolution of wildfire risk on the wildland-urban interface in British Columbia. Zane is also investigating how climate change-induced ecosystem shifts affect the collaborative management of natural resources. Before joining the M.A. program, Zane earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC and a B.A. in Economics from Sciences Po Paris.