Professor Laura Young Interview

Biography: Laura Jackson Young is an Associate Professor of Economics at Bentley University. She is the founder and co-advisor to WEB: Women in Economics at Bentley, a network with an interest in supporting women in the discipline of economics and advancing diversity of thought, background, and experiences in the field. At Bentley, Laura teaches introductory, intermediate, and advanced economics courses and is co-advisor to Bentley’s Fed Challenge team. She also serves as the Faculty Research Director for the Gloria Cordes Larson Center for Women and Business. 

Laura frequently serves as a Visiting Scholar to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, after holding research fellowships at both the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and Kansas City. She collaborates with leading researchers on questions related to macroeconomics, monetary and fiscal policy, international financial markets, and business cycle dynamics. 

Laura holds a Bachelor of Science in Managerial Economics from Bentley University and a Master’s and PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She now resides in Westford, MA with her husband and son. 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laura-jackson-young-9511a616

Interview Q&A:   

Walk me through your career. 

I went to Bentley for my undergrad where I planned on mainly studying finance. I was getting ready to graduate into the financial crisis, so I had to reevaluate what I wanted to do. At the end of my junior year, I decided I wanted to go to grad school. I settled on managerial economics so I could fit as many economics and math classes into my schedule to go to graduate school. I left Bentley to go to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I was there for five years. I went to grad school thinking I wanted to be in academics, but once I was in grad school I realized I wanted to work in policy. I worked at three different Federal Reserve Banks including Boston, Kansas City, and St. Louis. By the time I was finishing, Bentley was looking for a macro money professor which was my field. All the stars aligned, and I ended up where I was supposed to be. 

How did you decide to follow the economic career path? 

I originally wanted to study finance and maybe go into investment banking. In finance, you learn a lot of tools, so I liked that in my economics classes I was telling a story about the tools. This is where it clicked for me because I was able to answer the question “So what?” I was learning the mechanics of finance and learning how to tell a story about the mechanics I was getting in finance. I went down this route and I liked the modeling side of economics because I got to see why things work the way they do. I changed my major four times, so I like to remind students that college is not a linear path.  

How was your experience working at the Federal Reserve Banks? Were there any big differences between the three banks? 

Initially, I held fellowships in several research departments. Academic economists get hired on the research side. As a visiting researcher at a Fed Bank, I had a lot of autonomy when it came to what I wanted to research. I was working with people who did macro money, so this was modeling financial markets, modeling business cycles, and business forecasting. The team I was working with in St. Louis, who I still work with, does a lot of policy work. I liked the research side because as an academic, you can do a lot of research for the sake of research, but when you’re working in the bank, someone is going to use the research that I did. I liked that someone cared and could actually implement change based on the research that I did.  

Each of the three banks was drastically different. In Boston, the macro group had a focus on urban regional topics. Everyone kind of kept to themselves which was weird for me because I was a graduate student working a fellowship. In Kansas City, it was almost the other extreme where everybody worked together. Everyone was helpful and friendly; even people not in my field would want to talk about things with me. St. Louis is where I ended up finding my place. Someone from my PhD committee worked at St. Louis, so that’s how I ended up getting connected with them. That’s how I keep working there. They have a big macro group, and they have a lot of support for that kind of research. 

What topic in economics interests you most and why? Have you done any really interesting research projects on the topic? 

My research agenda for the past three years is different than how I started. I look at the impact of different types of macro policies on economic and financial markets. I started working on the inequality literature and how macro policies affect inequality. Given the worsening inequality in the US, we wanted to examine how the types of monetary policies after the financial crisis and Covid benefitted asset holders. We are channeling funds via financial markets to people that hold assets, but if you don’t have assets then you are not benefited as much. I have a few different papers where I look at how you measure inequality and once we figure out how to measure it, then we look at how policy affects inequality.  

What different sorts of inequality are you looking at and for what period? 

There is no clear answer as to whether it should be wealth inequality or income inequality. Overall, the data are bad, we don’t have good or high-frequency data, so a lot of inequality data are at the annual level in the CPS or Census, government-level data, but interest rates change throughout the year, so it’s hard to measure that. We’re looking at income because we want to look at people earning more rather than just accumulating wealth. There’s a team of folks who compiled numerous different public data sources, but it makes it hard to focus on just one thing to look at. We ended up looking at two measures: the consumer expenditure survey which is higher frequency and then there is current population survey which is lower frequency. We are using the two of them together to be able to look at income inequality and consumption inequality. We want to see how much someone is earning compared to how much they are spending to look at their standard of living. We look at top earners who are in the 95th-99th percentile and compare that to the median earners.  

We are looking at data from 1980 to present, mainly 2022. So, around 40 years of data. 

Do you have any advice for women who want to enter the economic career path, but are intimidated? 

I don’t know if it was me being naive, but during my graduate school years, I never thought of myself as a woman economist. I can admit that I am very privileged to not have experienced that pressure during grad school. My office mate was an amazing woman, she was at the top of her class, so seeing her made me realize that there is nothing that can hold me back. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the story of being in the minority, so you have to remind yourself that you should do you. It is awesome to find women mentors, but having mentors in general is important. My mentors were all men and were successful in the field, but what’s most important is that they were willing to help me grow. Something cool about economics is it’s such a collaborative field. You typically want a team of economists, so you want to get on a team that is doing the type of work that you want to be doing. Being a minority in the field just means that you need to find your team. You find a team that makes you all collectively stronger.  

What made you come back to teach at Bentley? 

When I was coming out of undergrad, no one was getting a job in finance. I was working in the Economics-Finance Learning Center, the precursor to the LEAF Lab (Learning for Economics, Accounting, and Finance) where I liked talking and explaining stuff to people, so I looked at my career path and saw that investment banking didn’t necessarily align with what I liked doing. I thought it was cool to see professors teach what they thought was interesting, which was appealing to me. I went to graduate school and once I started to get a taste of the policy side, I started to feel a practical connection with the work. I started doing that and I liked it, but doing research all day every day wasn’t exhilarating to me. The academic publishing process was long and tedious, so I knew that I liked the research policy work, just not all the time. I got into this thinking I wanted to go into academics, so I entertained this idea again. I was working at the Fed when I got a phone call from someone working at Bentley who said that they were hiring a macro money person and they asked if I would be interested in applying, to which I said yes.  

Since you know Bentley’s resources from the perspective of a student, what resources would you recommend that students utilize to learn more about economics outside of class? 

Working in the LEAF Lab and being able to talk about things out loud with other students. We have seminar speakers who come in, so students can see real world applications. Utilizing these resources to see people doing economics is a helpful tool. Watching the markets react in real time connects to what is being said in class. To see everything in action is way more impactful. 

Advice you have for students at Bentley right now and those who are about to graduate? 

The job market is hard right now and the economy is uncertain. It is easy to get stuck in one track, which is awesome to have that ambition, but things don’t always go as planned. This may close students off to other opportunities that are outside of their plan. Being flexible in what you are interested in studying and being flexible when applying for jobs. I had an alum tell me she initially started applying for jobs that were exactly in the subfield she wanted, but then she started applying to jobs that were only tangentially related. Either way, you are learning something about that field, so you are improving your knowledge and not closing off any opportunities that there may be.