Rackham One-Term Dissertation Fellowships are intended to speed the process of completing the dissertation. Except in unusual cases, they should be awarded to students who are at the writing stage of the dissertation. This will permit candidates to work full-time on the final stages of their dissertations.
Winter 2026 Recipients:
Joyce Kim
Joyce Kim is a fifth-year PhD student in Economics. Her main fields of study are Public Finance and Labor Economics. In particular, she is interested in the topics of taxation, human capital, inequality, labor market discrimination, and political economy. She combines both structural and empirical approaches to study these topics. In her current PhD research, she studies (i) the optimal income taxation and educational subsidies when education makes individuals' income more accurately reflect ability; (ii) the impacts of the zero personal income taxation on young adults; and (iii) the impacts and dynamics of blind hiring on employers' hiring decisions.
In the long run, Joyce hopes to contribute not only to advancing academic knowledge but also to designing and evaluating related policies.
David Ontaneda
David Ontaneda is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Michigan. His research is focused on the industrial organization of credit markets. He previously worked for Ecuador’s Ministry of Economic Policy and Competition Authority. David holds a BA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador and master’s degrees from Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, Lund University, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Xinrui Zhou
Xinrui Zhou is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Michigan, specializing in international macroeconomics and monetary economics. Her research examines the economic consequences of global supply chain disruptions, inflation dynamics, and population aging. Her current work studies how port congestion during the pandemic affected local domestic prices and explores the underlying transmission channels using large, novel micro-level datasets.
In addition, she works with the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, focusing on consumer sentiment, inflation expectations, and the socio-political implications of persistent inflation. One of her ongoing projects examines the relationship between inflation and electoraloutcomes.
Xinrui is committed to producing policy-relevant research that advances academic understandingwhile informing real-world economic decision-making.
