People

Talha Samil Cakir is an Economist at the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. He received his PhD in Economics from Purdue University in May 2026, after completing an MA in Economics at Koc University and a BA in Economics, with a minor in Mathematics, at Sabanci University. His research interests span macroeconomics, monetary economics, financial economics, and experimental economics, with a particular focus on digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, monetary policy, and financial stability. At the Central Bank, he works in the Research and Monetary Policy Department, where he closely monitors developments in the Turkish economy, conducts research centered on inflation dynamics and price developments, and contributes to the Digital Turkish Lira (CBDC) project.

I am a PhD student in Economics at Purdue University. My research interests are in international trade and economic development, with a focus on trade policy generally, as well as the structure of markets in developing countries.

I am currently working on quantifying firm entrepreneurship wedges in India along caste lines, using a general equilibrium model featuring firm ownership (by caste) and heterogeneous worker ability. My second project focuses on characterizing product-level US trade policy in the first half of the 20th century, leveraging novel historical data. My third project explores the structure of agricultural wholesale markets in India and their implications for the prices and the distribution of agricultural products.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Purdue University. My research interests include international trade, industrial organization, macroeconomics, and applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on firms, prices, technology, and global supply chains.

My current research studies the economic effects of semiconductor export controls, including how restrictions on advanced technologies affect international trade, supplier compliance, production capacity, and welfare. I also work on research examining multinational semiconductor firms and the geography of innovation, using firm-level data on production, investment, and technological development. In addition, I study consumer behavior and competition in retail gasoline markets using detailed price and geolocation data.

My research combines structural economic modeling with empirical methods, including causal inference and the analysis of large-scale trade, firm, price, and geospatial datasets.

I am currently in my third year of the Economics PhD program at Purdue, where I specialize in Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory. My research agenda is centered around non-neutral financing and its implications for economic growth and monetary policy. My present work focuses on the composition effects of liquid balances within a firm’s investible resources, wherein I explore how altering the composition of liquid balances can have non-neutral implications for the feasible investment set and, therefore, the broader trend in economic growth. At the heart of this research, I argue that firm valuations allow firms to price their collateral, and hence their purchasing power, according to the market’s expectations of their growth prospects. This generates a feedback mechanism, where increases to present valuations finances investments into future technological development, through collateral pricing propagation.

Prior to studying at Purdue, I earned a dual major in Economics and Mathematics from Indiana University Bloomington. After my undergraduate education, I worked for the state government in Indiana in various fiscal policy and financial analysis positions, including staffing the State House of Representatives Ways and Means committee, and working for the State Budget Agency’s Economic and Workforce Development division. During this time, I also earned an MS in Economics through Purdue, specializing in Financial Economics.

Yuri Kim is a Ph.D. student in Economics at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business. Her research lies at the intersection of monetary economics and corporate finance, with a focus on how financial frictions affect lending, investment, and firm survival.

Her current research studies how changes in collateral prices affect firms’ access to credit and banks’ decisions when borrowers face financial distress. In a project on zombie lending, she develops a model of bank–firm matching and lending contracts and examines evidence from U.S. firms and syndicated loans. The project explores how higher collateral values can ease borrowing constraints while also changing incentives to continue lending to distressed firms. More broadly, she is interested in how asset prices and credit market frictions affect the allocation of capital.

Yuri also studies the financing of innovation, including how borrowing constraints affect the trade of ideas. Her broader interests include digital currency and stablecoins. Her research experience includes a Ph.D. internship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy and in the credit-rating industry.

Yixuan Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue University. Her research is in international trade and applied microeconomics.

Her work on population aging studies how demographic change alters what countries import, as consumers of different ages buy different goods and those purchases ripple through global supply chains. Her research on higher education asks how expanding the variety of majors affects enrollment, costs, and the quality-adjusted price of college.

I am an Economics PhD candidate at Purdue University, studying how aggregate economic shocks play out unevenly across regions. In one of my papers, I examine how the employment effects of fiscal stimulus depend not only on the size of the program, but also on where it is spent. In related work, I study how tariffs propagate across sectors and places with the help of a multi-region input-output model. My research combines empirical evidence with structural models solved computationally. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a data scientist developing production machine learning credit-risk models. I enjoy playing bullet chess in my free time.

I am an economics Ph.D. student at Purdue University. My research interests include international trade policy and economic history. My particular interest in international trade involves studying how trade policy impacts firm behavior, and how that behavior shapes the broader economy. This includes examining how United States firms reacted to the recent increase in tariffs passed since 2018, and how capital allocation has been affected as a result. Modern history has always been an additional academic passion of mine, and as a result economic history has developed as a natural subject of my research interests. Within economic history, I am especially interested in the cases of historical tariff hikes, given their relation to modern trade policy.

My teaching experience includes teaching principles of microeconomics at Purdue University. This course introduces student to the economic way of thinking, leaving them with an understanding of the trade-offs they face in their everyday lives.

I am originally from Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended Bellarmine University and received my B.A. in economics and history in 2024.

I am a PhD candidate in Economics, working on search and matching models in transportation markets. My research studies how agents search for and match with trading partners in decentralized markets, and how location affects competition, matching opportunities, and prices. I am especially interested in how allowing agents to search across locations affects market outcomes and the value of spatial access.