Article | March 17, 2026
Arnold Y. Castillo writes in Latin Business Daily on the growing impact of executive scandals and reputational risk in Latin America’s high-exposure environment.
Dr. Du is an economist with expertise in labor economics, computational economics, public finance, and macroeconomics.
Dr. Du’s research focuses on developing rich models of unemployment and income risk using advanced computational methods. In one paper, conditionally accepted at Quantitative Economics, he builds a general equilibrium model of consumption and unemployment risk to demonstrate that unemployment benefit extensions generate more stimulus and greater welfare gains compared to stimulus checks and tax cuts.
In related work, published as a Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper, Dr. Du employs machine learning methods to impute households’ perceptions of their risk of unemployment and to generate real-time machine forecasts of the actual risk of unemployment. His findings reveal a systematic underreaction: households tend to adjust their perceptions sluggishly in response to changes in their true unemployment risk.
Before joining Secretariat, Dr. Du worked as a PhD intern at the Bank of England and as a developer for an economic modeling Python package. He also served as a teaching assistant and section instructor at Johns Hopkins University.