Left to right: Seth Gershenson, Dave Marcotte, and Erdal Tekin

Three School of Public Affairs (SPA) faculty members have been named Research Fellows by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.

Seth Gershenson is the most recent faculty member to be chosen for the prestigious honor. He joins Erdal Tekin, who has worked extensively with IZA, and Dave Marcotte, the new director of SPA's Washington Institute for Public Affairs Research. Tekin and Marcotte have been IZA Research Fellows since 2004 and 2006, respectively.

"This allows us to circulate our current and in-progress research as IZA discussion papers to a large, international, interdisciplinary audience," Gershenson said. "It eliminates the problem of publication lag and facilitates real-time constructive feedback and potential collaborations with scholars who are working on similar topics," he added.

Research Fellows have access to rich administrative datasets housed at IZA, such as German employer-employee matched data on wages and labor supply. This opens potential research collaborations, and offers an opportunity to establish connections between SPA and the international community of labor economists studying labor-market policy.

"IZA serves not only as a mechanism to integrate the work economists are doing, but also as a conduit to the broader world, by communicating the work of applied economists to policymakers and others," said IZA Fellow Dave Marcotte.

Earlier this year, IZA and SPA jointly organized the 7th Annual Meeting on the Economics of Risky Behaviors in Izmir, Turkey. Established in 1998 in Bonn, Germany, IZA is a private independent economic research institute focused on the analysis of global labor markets. It operates an international network of about 1,500 economists and researchers spanning across more than 50 countries.

IZA Director Klaus Zimmerman plans to visit AU School of Public Affairs in November 2015.