AARON M. MEDLIN

Hello and welcome to my website. I am this guy pretentiously pictured to the left.

I am a doctoral student of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and research assistant with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).

I hold a master’s degree in economics, and I am ABD status in the UMass Economics PhD program. I intend to defend my dissertation and graduate toward the end of this academic year, but most certainly before August 2023. My fields of expertise include macroeconomics, finance, central banking, international finance, and comparative economic systems.

My dissertation focuses on international lending between central banks; specifically, it explores the intersection between benchmark interest rates and central bank currency swap lending during periods of financial crises, such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. I am also presently conducting research with my dissertation supervisor, Gerald Epstein, on the relationship between central bank policy and wealth inequality in the United States. My research agenda will continue primarily in these two veins of inquiry for the next couple of years.

I have a strong econometrics background, using various regression methods and techniques to advance knowledge on important research questions from the effects of immigration on business expansion, my first peer-reviewed journal publication out of undergrad, to most recently, the impact of monetary policy and inflation on the wealth distribution.

I enjoy teaching economics and about the financial system, providing students with a foundational understanding of the economy and government policy. Most of my experience comes from being a macroeconomics course teaching assistant and instructor at the intro and intermediate levels.

My general approach to the curriculum is to expose students to an eclectic range of economic perspectives, for example, introducing students to some Post-Keynesian approaches and theories in addition to the mainstream New Keynesian ones in macroeconomics, highlighting contemporary theoretical and policy debates. I am also a strong advocate of going beyond basic theoretical models in textbooks and introducing students to basic statistical principles, particularly how to access public sources of data, analyze them, and use them to formulate their own perspectives about the state of the economy.

I have also had the privilege of working as a research assistant for professors at both IUSB and UMass, and I have interned with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington D.C.

You can check out my commentary on Medium and my research under the tab "Research." Thanks for stopping by.