The Department of Economics in the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame has added 11 new economists to its faculty, including two endowed chairs and two full professors.

The significant expansion for the department includes leaders in economic subfields such as family, poverty, policy, development, health, and macroeconomics.

“Our new colleagues represent a mix of established senior scholars and junior faculty fresh out of graduate school. Taken together, they have research interests that span virtually all the subfields of economics,” said Eric Sims, professor and department chair. “These new colleagues will help propel our department to new heights.”

Melissa S. Kearney

Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics

For the past 25 years, Melissa S. Kearney has focused her research on poverty, inequality, and families in America. Her work on how shifts in fertility patterns, family structure, and the social safety net affect economic outcomes in the United States has both shaped her field and impacted public policy.

“I came to these topics with a very deep interest in understanding people's lives and people's struggles, and how our economic institutions and government policies can make people's lives harder or better,” she said. “What I've really come to appreciate in doing this research for more than two decades is that family structure — and the family life of children in particular — is extremely predictive of people's outcomes and their ability to flourish in life.”

Kearney’s research has been published widely in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, AEJ: Applied Economics, AEJ: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics, among others. She currently serves as the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group and is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Prior to her arrival at Notre Dame, Kearney was the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. Her book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago, 2023), garnered significant public attention. In it, she shows that when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. She further shows that the socioeconomic class divide in family structure in this country is exacerbating inequality and cementing class gaps in outcomes.

“I’ve long been part of these academic and policy conversations about how to address poverty and inequality in America, and in those conversations, what we as social scientists and as policymakers have tended to focus on is how to improve schools, how to improve neighborhoods, and how to strengthen government safety net programs, among other important issues,” she said. “But the academic evidence is very clear that families are really important and that particular issue was often missing from these academic and policy conversations — because in many ways, it’s harder to talk about. So I wrote a book to try and bring the relevant evidence and conversation to the public, and to take the issue of family out of the ‘culture wars’ and elevate it as a policy matter.”

Kearney’s work has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Economic Research, MIT’s Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and several private foundations. She has also served as a scholar affiliate and board member of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) since that lab’s inception.

Kearney’s appointment reflects the University’s commitment to researching the causes of poverty and how to end it through the Poverty Initiative. At Notre Dame, she will launch and develop the Strengthening Families Research Initiative, which includes an ambitious research agenda focused on questions about how to increase rates of marriage and family stability, how to improve outcomes for fragile and unmarried families, and how to reform systems that work with vulnerable families. She is also intending to collaborate with ND Population Analytics to develop support for large data sets for research to better understand issues surrounding marriage and fertility.

“I would like to launch new surveys as part of this initiative, to gain insights we can’t get from existing data sets,” she said. “The ability to undertake activities like that is part of what makes what’s happening at Notre Dame so exciting — there is a real commitment to providing interdisciplinary structures and the resources that researchers need to really make progress on answering very complex and vexing questions.”

Enrique Seira Bejarano

Joe and Deborah Loughrey Professor of Economics

Development economist Enrique Seira Bejarano has increasingly focused his work on courts, political economy, and democracy. He specifically seeks to understand why judicial systems in developing countries often underperform, what the root causes of democratic backsliding are, and how policies can support democracy and strengthen social bonds.

“I was drawn to these questions because, in many countries, people’s everyday lives are shaped by institutions that often fail them,” Seira said. “I want to understand why these institutions underperform and what specific steps can be taken to make them more effective.”

Seira’s work has been published in leading academic journals and has received numerous awards, including the Citi Banamex Prize, the Simonsen Prize, and the Urquidi Prize. He previously served as director of the Center for Economic Research at Autonomus Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), and has worked at the International Finance Corporation, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Economics, and the Central Bank of Mexico.

Seira’s research on international poverty bolsters the Poverty Initiative’s efforts to support work that aims to solve poverty in all its complexity across the globe. He joins Notre Dame from Michigan State University, where he was the Frederick S. Addy Distinguished Professor of Economics. Here, his work will be supported by the Poverty Initiative, the Building Inclusive Growth (BIG) Lab, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

“Notre Dame is in a position to provide the investment and infrastructure to execute ambitious projects that produce rigorous scientific evidence and practical solutions to the world’s biggest challenges,” Seira said. “I am interested in connecting with people, researchers, and donors who share my interest in strengthening democracy, the rule of law, and the bonds of community.”

Christian Matthes

Professor of Economics

As a macroeconomist and econometrician, Christian Matthes examines economy-wide phenomena such as inflation and unemployment. Previously a professor of economics at Indiana University, Matthes works to develop statistical methods that allow the prediction of the causal effects of changes in fiscal and monetary policies on the economy as a whole.

“What attracted me initially to my research is the combination of mathematical rigor and questions that everyone can relate to,” he said. “For example, should the government tax more or less? Should Congress pass a bill that invests in new infrastructure?”

Matthes said he came to Notre Dame because of its research reputation combined with its distinct mission.

“I also appreciate Notre Dame’s sense of community — both within my department and throughout the College and University,” he said. “That is really appealing to me.”

Rebecca Thornton

Professor of Economics

Rebecca Thornton is a microeconomist whose research focuses on health, education, and gender — specifically on how policies and programs affect decision-making around education and health in low-income settings. Before coming to Notre Dame, Thornton was the Herman Brown Chaired Professor of Economics in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.

Her research trajectory was largely shaped by living in low-income countries such as Nepal, Kenya, and Malawi, which “fostered a deep love of learning local languages and immersing in new cultures and perspectives.”

Early in her career, she studied low-income countries where decisions around schooling, reproductive health, marriage, and gender life significantly impact individuals and communities. Over time, her interests broadened to include a deeper understanding of human flourishing and extended to higher-income settings.

Being at Notre Dame, Thornton said, will help her answer pressing questions such as how forgiveness, human suffering, and perspectives shape choices and constrain welfare, and whether models can be developed to better capture drivers of well-being that inform policies and practices that support human flourishing.

“I was drawn to Notre Dame as the preeminent Catholic university in the United States because it is a place that embodies the integration of faith, reason, and rigorous intellectual inquiry,” she said. “In today’s higher education environment, this commitment is especially important. I appreciate that Notre Dame creates a space where diverse perspectives can engage thoughtfully and supports research that addresses both practical and deeply human questions about well-being, purpose, and flourishing.”

Five tenure-track additions

Jooyoung Cha recently received her Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University and joined Notre Dame’s economics department as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on econometrics, especially high-dimensional methods, machine learning, and causal inference. Her recent work focuses on reliable inference in settings with many controls.

Econometrician JoonHwan Cho is an assistant professor whose research focuses on developing econometric methods for partially identified models and structural models in empirical industrial organization. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Toronto in 2023, and prior to joining Notre Dame in 2025, he was a faculty member at Binghamton University.

Yijun Liu’s research concentration lies in microeconomic theory, with a particular focus on mechanism design and information economics. She applies mechanism design methods to address real-world problems, such as designing optimal contracts, rating systems, and compensation schemes in the presence of incentive issues arising from asymmetric information (adverse selection). She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2025 and joined Notre Dame as an assistant professor in economics.

Assistant professor Jeremy Majerovitz studies macroeconomics and economic development, with a particular interest in firm dynamics, misallocation, and financial frictions. His work blends theory and empirics to estimate models of firm behavior and study counterfactuals. He has been published in academic journals such as Review of Economic Studies and AER: Papers and Proceedings. Prior to joining Notre Dame, Majerovitz worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Patrick Turner initially joined the University in 2018 as a research faculty member with LEO and has now transitioned to an assistant professor position in the economics department. An applied microeconomist, Turner focuses on the intersection of public policy and the labor market. Through his work with LEO, he partners with state and local governments and social service agencies to quantify the impact of their adult education, workforce, and anti-poverty programs. His research has been published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. His work was also recently highlighted through the University’s “What Would You Fight For?” series that airs on NBC during home football games.

Teaching and research faculty

Adrienne Judson is an assistant teaching professor who works with the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative's Poverty Research Fellows program. She is currently designing the new Evidence-Based Poverty Alleviation Concentration for economics and international economics majors. Judson recently obtained her Ph.D. from Georgetown University and is a labor and applied microeconomist. She concentrates her research on the employment of individuals with disabilities and policies that support disabled workers

Lauren Schechter is an assistant research professor with LEO at Notre Dame. She obtained her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado and was previously a postdoctoral fellow for the Social Science Research Council's Prosecution Research Initiative. Schechter studies topics in labor economics and the economics of crime, with a focus on domestic poverty alleviation.

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on September 30, 2025.