The Department of Economics is committed to providing students, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, the opportunity to develop the skills to critically analyze economic data, to better understand and evaluate policies in both the private and public sectors, and to contribute more broadly to the betterment of society, both locally and globally.
Faculty are actively engaged in quantitative research that help better the understanding of the operation of the economy. That research includes the impact of government tax, transfer, trade and regulatory policies on economic development and well-being at the individual, household, firm, and macroeconomic levels.
The Department of Economics houses the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER), an applied economic research center focused on providing economic analysis and information to Kentucky’s decision makers, the Center for Poverty Research (UKCPR), a federally-funded cross-disciplinary center providing research to inform evidence-based policy on poverty and inequality in the United States and the Kentucky Research Data Center (KRDC), which serves to expand the data infrastructure available to qualified scholars and students with approved projects by providing access to restricted individual and firm-level data from participating federal statistical agencies. The department is affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise (ISFE), which is dedicated to understanding the role that markets play in the economy and in society.
Eleanor Krause received a competitive Early Career Grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth (WCEG). According to the WCEG, these grants are "targeted at those early in their careers whose research is policy-relevant and can inform how policymakers can take action to create more stable, broadly shared U.S.
Carlos Lamarche's paper titled "Quantiles of the Gain Distribution of an Early Childhood Intervention" has been accepted and published online by the Journal of Applied Econometrics. This paper is a joint effort with Erich Battistin and Ebruci Rettore. Read the paper here.
Felipe Benguria's paper, "Escaping the trade war: Finance and relational supply chains in the adjustment to trade policy shocks" is forthcoming in the Journal of International Economics. The paper shows how US exports were reallocated in response to foreign tariffs in the context of the 2018-2019 trade war.
Read the paper here.
Carlos Lamarche, Ph.D., director of graduate studies and Gatton Endowed Professor of Economics in the University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business and Economics, has been honored as a 2024-25 University Research Professor.
Lamarche studies econometrics — a combination of economics, statistics and mathematics that aims to give empirical content to economic relationships. He focuses on the development of estimation methods for a more informative and robust analysis of microeconomic data.
