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Illenin O. Kondo is a Senior Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis within the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute.
Kondo works on quantitative macroeconomic models of sovereign debt crises, trade-induced labor reallocation, the optimal design of infrastructure networks, and more recently the evolution of racial economic disparities in the U.S. He co-leads the Income Distributions and Dynamics in America (IDDA, "eye--dah") research partnership working on understanding granular income differences.
Prior to joining the Minneapolis Fed, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. He also served as a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, in the Trade and Financial Studies section of the Division of International Finance. He also taught at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Minnesota.
He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO) and served as general co-chair of its inaugural ACM EAAMO conference (EAAMO '21). He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the Massachusetts Wealth Survey and th Minnesota Federal Statistical Research Data Center (MnRDC) Steering Committee. He served as member of the National Economic Association's (NEA) Committee on Macroeconomic Policy and Race and edited its inaugural volume.
He received his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Tim Kehoe, Fabrizio Perri, and Cristina Arellano. He also holds an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from Supélec (now Centrale-Supélec) in France.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
International and Spatial Trade: trade reforms and labor markets
International Macro: globalization, financial crises, and sovereign debt
Inequality: racial disparities in wealth and income in the U.S.
Growth and Firm Heterogeneity in the U.S. using Census microdata
Development: political institutions and infrastructure networks