The Bank of Canada is pleased to announce the recipients of the Bank’s 2024 Fellowship Award and Governor’s Award.

Fellowship Award

Michelle Alexopoulos
Professor of Economics, Department of Economics
University of Toronto
Professor Alexopoulos is a macroeconomist, her oft-cited research focuses on the business cycle as well as the effects of technical change and uncertainty. She has innovated in the application of data mining and textual analysis to create indicators for economic modeling and forecasting. Dr. Alexopoulos has an ongoing research project with the Bank on central bank communications, which she will continue to pursue over her term in addition to her work on technological change and productivity. Professor Alexopoulos is also president of the Canadian Economics Association and a co-chair of its mentoring committee and Canadian Economics Diversity Committee (CEDC) in addition to being a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, the Data Sciences Institute and the School of Cities at University of Toronto and a member of the C.D. Howe Institute’s Business Cycle Council. She is a previous recipient of the Fellowship Award.

Krishna Pendakur
Professor of Economics, Department of Economics
Simon Fraser University
Professor Pendakur is an authority on the economics of well-being, discrimination, inequality, and poverty. His research interests also include consumer demand and applied econometrics, his work has broken new ground in under-studied areas like Indigenous income disparities, discrimination against ethnic minority groups and gender-based inequality within families. Over his Fellowship term he plans to delve into how rising prices affect different parts of the income distribution and how a social cost-of-living index might better represent the inflation experience of all Canadians. Dr. Pendakur is a 2023 SFU Distinguished Professor, and in 2022 he received the John Rae Prize, which is awarded every two years to the most productive Canadian scholar in economics over the preceding five years.

Diego Restuccia
Professor of Economics, Department of Economics
University of Toronto
Professor Restuccia is a macroeconomist whose research focuses on productivity and inequality. In his work he seeks to answer a fundamental question: what explains the large income differences between countries and disparities in their productivity? Professor Restuccia probes the connection between global macroeconomic trends, the ongoing transformation of the world economy, and the standards of living in both developed and developing countries. Professor Restuccia holds a Canada Research Chair in Macroeconomics and Productivity and is one of Canada’s most prolific and impactful academic researchers. He is also a past recipient of the Fellowship Award.

Governor’s Award

Markus Baldauf
Associate Professor of Finance, Sauder School of Business
University of British Columbia
Professor Baldauf is a financial economist and a leading scholar of market microstructure. His primary research interests are high-frequency trading, market fragmentation, and over-the-counter trading – key drivers of liquidity in modern equity markets. More broadly, he is examining how today’s dominant trends affect performance and market stability, which is one of the Bank’s core functions. He also studies the effect of climate-related risks on real estate markets. In addition to being published in the top peer-reviewed journals in his discipline, Dr. Baldauf occupies a prominent mentorship role in his department. He holds the B.I. Ghert Family Foundation Junior Professorship in Finance and Policy at the University of British Columbia.