PhD Job Market Candidates 2025/26

Placement Officer: Nicola Fontana

Giorgia Conte

I am a Quantitative Macroeconomist specializing in labor and family economics. My research combines dynamic structural macro models with empirical analysis applied to micro data (mainly Danish administrative data) to study questions at the intersection of labor markets, household decisions, and demographic change.

In my job market paper I develop a life-cycle model combining heterogeneous agents, endogenous fertility and parental investment across multiple stages of childhood. After calibrating it to U.S. data, I use it to estimate the heterogeneous effect of parental leave policies on fertility and child human capital formation. I show that paid leave increases higher-order births, primarily among low-income and less-educated households. However, this comes at the expense of children’s skill development, which declines due to reduced per-child investment following the increase in family size.

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Michael McRae

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Trinity College Dublin. My research lies in applied microeconomics, focusing on media economics, political economy, the evolution of norms, and the economics of AI. My dissertation consists of three solo-authored papers examining how economic and institutional forces shape political discourse across social media platforms, legacy newspapers, and religious broadcasting.

My job market paper asks how economic incentives shape social change through the media. I study Southern U.S. newspapers’ adoption of the label Black over Negro during the civil rights era, digitizing 58 million articles and historical circulation audits to measure local media competition. I show that white racial conservatism slowed newspapers’ adoption of Black, an effect amplified by competition, and that these symbolic shifts had real political consequences: in areas covered by the Voting Rights Act, early adopters saw significantly faster growth in Black officeholding.

Together, my work provides causal evidence on how profit-motivated actors in information markets mediate the relationship between social identity, political voice, and institutional power.

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