Ayşegül is one of the world leaders in the study of unemployment and labor markets from a macroeconomic perspective. Using a combination of theory and big data, she has written in top academic journals on topics such as the slow employment recovery in the wake of the Great Recession, the patterns through which workers search for jobs (and the macroeconomic implications of such behavior), and the drivers of entrepreneurship and business creation. She is a Research Associate at the NBER and serves as co-editor for the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

It is not surprising, given the highly policy-relevant topics of her research, that Ayşegül is also closely involved in advising policymakers. She currently serves on the Economic Advisory Panel to the Congressional Budget Office, as well as on other advisory panels at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She also worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a Vice President, among other roles, from 2004-2018.

Ayşegül received her PhD in Economics from the University of Rochester in 2002. Before that, she received her B.S. and M.S. from Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye. Since 2018, she has been the Richard J. Gonzalez Regents Chair in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Also joining Brown’s Economics Department will be Stefano Eusepi, whose work has led the push in economics to model expectations in macroeconomic models that deviate from the Full- Information Rational Expectations (FIRE) benchmark. These techniques, published in a variety of top academic journals, have proven crucial to understanding and predicting the effects of monetary policy on the economy. Stefano too worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a variety of roles from 2004-2018 before leaving to take up his current position as Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhDs from the University of Warwick (2004) and the University of Rome - Tor Vergata (2003).

Once at Brown, these two outstanding scholars will join with current faculty member Gauti Eggertsson and recently announced new hire Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan to form the new senior core of the macro group at Brown.