Today at Brown

Specializing in micro-econometrics and applied labor economics, Blaise Melly has a special interest in studying distributional treatment effects and wage inequality. His work proposes new methods that provide richer results in empirical applications than the existing procedures. These methods allow examining the heterogeneity of the economic agents by considering their whole distribution.

As Andrew Foster, chair of the Department of Economics, explained, a key part of Melly’s work is examining how one evaluates “treatments,” when those being treated are a select sample and when the treatment varies substantially across individuals. “While solving either problem alone can be a challenge, Blaise has made some key contributions in terms of how to address both issues together.”

Melly received a Ph.D. in economics from St. Gallen University in Switzerland in 2006. He comes to Brown from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a visiting scholar last year, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He previously served as a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen. Melly has published articles on quantile regression in both Labour Economics and Empirical Economics and has working papers on the wage effects of privatization and the effects of job-training programs on individual earnings.

“From our perspective Blaise Melly is the best kind of econometrician — theoretically sophisticated enough to make substantive contributions in econometric theory but motivated by important practical problems of estimation,” said Foster.

Melly will be teaching in the department’s graduate core and also serve as the laboratory professor in the large undergraduate econometrics course.