IO @ UMN

Welcome to the IO group at the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities!

We are a small, active group of faculty and graduate students working on industrial organization — the study of how firms compete, how markets are structured, and how policy shapes both. Our research spans retail and spatial competition, demand estimation and productivity, the economics of digitization, and health and insurance markets, and our students go on to careers in academia, government, and industry. We meet weekly, host a monthly seminar with leading IO economists, and take pride in being a place where students get serious attention from faculty.

Current Members

Our Curriculum

Current Members

Faculty: Thomas Holmes, Amil Petrin, Joel Waldfogel, Anran Li

Graduate Students: Christina Shin, Ekin Ulusoy, Meghana Bhaskar, Emin Birkan, Byungho Lee, Xiang Liu, Argyrios Koutsopoulos

Our Curriculum

A year-round second-year graduate sequence

Our year-round second-year sequence covers the core toolkit of modern IO: demand estimation, production function and productivity estimation, dynamic models of firm and consumer behavior, auctions, and an applied empirical block where students work through recent papers in detail. The sequence is taught by IO faculty in rotation and is designed to prepare students to start original research by the end of the year.

Weekly student work-in-progress lunches

Every week, one student or faculty member presents work in progress — early ideas, half-finished empirical work, conference rehearsals, or job-market practice. Attendance is informal but consistent, and feedback is the real thing. This is where most projects in the group take shape.

Monthly IO seminar

Our seminar brings leading IO economists to present recent research roughly once a month during the academic year (see below). Students are expected to attend the seminar and join meals/group meetings with the speaker.

IO Seminar

Upcoming

05/06/2026, Michael Sinkinson . "Productivity and Subsidies in Two-Sided Markets: the Case of Local Newspapers"
09/16/2026, Ying Fan
10/07/2026, Gautam Gowrisankaran
TBD, Jean-François Houde

Past

04/15/2026, Lorenzo Magnolfi, "Market Counterfactuals with Nonparametric Supply: An ML/AI Approach" [pdf]
04/08/2026, Ashley Swanson, "Are Hospital Acquisitions of Physician Practices Anticompetitive?" [pdf]
03/18/2026, Nicholas Buchholz, "Rigidities in Decentralized Spot Markets: Evidence from the U.S. Freight Network."
02/13/2026, Nikhil Agarwal, "Combining Human Expertise with Artificial Intelligence: Experimental Evidence from Radiology" [pdf]
10/31/2025, Tobias Salz, "Sources of Market Power in Web Search: Evidence from a Field Experiment". [pdf]
10/24/2025 - 10/25/2025, Pat Bajari Memorial Conference
10/21/2025, Milena Almalgo, "Data-Driven Nests in Nested Logit Models."
10/07/2025, Thomas Wollmann, "Painful Bargaining: Evidence from Anesthesia Rollups" [pdf]
09/30/2025, Panle Barwick, "A Double Dose of Reform: Insurance and Centralized Negotiation in Drug Markets" [pdf]

Why IO at UMN

A distinctive group, with breadth. The four IO faculty at Minnesota cover a wide slice of the field, offering students exposure to structural methods, applied empirical work, and policy-relevant questions across very different industries.

Small group, real mentorship. Because we're a focused group rather than a sprawling field, students get genuine access to faculty. Advising relationships start early, the weekly work-in-progress lunch brings students and faculty together every week, and committees are easy to form among faculty whose interests overlap.

A serious seminar. Our monthly IO seminar brings leading researchers to Minneapolis. Students attend and meet with visitors over meals and one-on-ones: a core part of how the field works, and a real advantage of being part of a connected IO community.

Twin Cities, a livable city. Minneapolis is a genuinely good place to do a PhD: affordable, easy to live in, with a strong economics department and lakes everywhere.

Prospective Student

Prospective PhD applicants.

If you're considering a PhD in economics and IO is a field you're considering, we'd love to hear from you. Applications are submitted through the Department of Economics — IO is not a separate track, and admitted students choose fields during their first two years. Please kindly note that we don't have a formal pre-application contact requirement.

Current UMN PhD students.

If you're in your first or second year and curious about IO, the easiest entry point is the weekly work-in-progress lunch — just show up. The second-year sequence is open to anyone who has completed the core. For more involved questions about field choice or advising, any of the IO faculty is happy to talk.

Our Alumni

Under construction...