Ryan Monarch, assistant professor of economics, has been awarded this year’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, the Maxwell School’s highest honor for untenured faculty. The award will be presented at the Maxwell School’s Graduate Convocation on Friday, May 9, with Monarch as the featured speaker.

The Moynihan Award is given annually in recognition of an outstanding record of teaching, research and service. It was established eponymously in 1985 by then-U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was also a former member of Maxwell’s junior faculty from 1959 to 1961.

Monarch joined Maxwell in August 2021 after serving as principal economist for the international finance division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2021. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan in 2014.

Monarch studies U.S.-China trade, buyer-supplier relationships in international trade and how the recent tariff war affects U.S. exports and supply chains. His research has been published in the Journal of International Economics–the top journal in international economics–and multiple other top-tier economics journals, such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and American Economics Journal: Applied Economics. He has also written numerous policy reports. His work has been sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Economist and Reuters. 

In recent months, Monarch has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the South China Morning Post, the New York Post, Spectrum TV, NPR, The Motley Fool, and other outlets for his expertise on ongoing events in international trade policy, and he served as a panelist for the Maxwell School event “Trump’s Tariffs: Issues and Implications” held on April 9. 

The Moynihan award recipient was chosen by a committee of faculty comprised of Leonard Lopoo, Andrew Cohen and Emily Thorson. In a nomination letter submitted by Lopoo, they noted that Monarch is “an expert in international trade” who has “made important contributions to the ‘buyer-supplier matching’ topic.”

“His course evaluations are outstanding,” wrote Lopoo, associate dean, chair and professor of public administration and international affairs. “Students frequently commented on how Professor Monarch makes complicated topics easy to understand” and enjoyable to learn.

Lopoo also noted Monarch’s “important service to the Maxwell School,” serving on the international trade search committee and serving as director of the Trade, Development, and Political Economy Workshop. 

By Michael Kelly