Oleg Itskhoki, UCLA’s Venu and Ana Kotamraju Professor of Economics, and co-author Dmitry Mukhin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison have won the best paper award in asset pricing from the Midwest Finance Association. Their paper shows that there is no simultaneous change in the properties of the other macroeconomic variables — neither nominal like inflation, nor real like consumption, output or net exports. They argue that rather than discriminating between models with sticky versus flexible prices, or monetary versus productivity shocks, the Mussa puzzle provides sharp evidence in favor of models with monetary non-neutrality arising due to financial market segmentation.
Itskhoki is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and an associate editor at the American Economic Review. He participated in the 2009 Review of Economic Studies Tour, was a Sloan Research Fellow from 2015 to 2017 and was on the International Monetary Fund’s list of 25 economists under 45. His areas of interest include globalization and labor markets as well as exchange rates and international relative prices. His work studies macroeconomic consequences of various frictions — in the labor, financial and product markets, and in nominal price setting — in economies with microlevel heterogeneity, connecting theory with detailed microlevel data.
The Midwest Finance Association is a professional association of academics and finance industry professionals dedicated to developing and disseminating information concerning recent advances in financial theory and practice.
