Wallace Fellowship

The Wallace Fellowship is available to students from first-year students to senior year who have an interest in macroeconomics, international finance, exchange rates or applied empirical issues.

Current Wallace Fellowships:

Sebastian Anastasi is a Ph.D. student in economics at Clemson University. He earned a B.A. in Economics with a minor in Mathematics from Grove City College. His research interests include public economics, labor economics and organizational economics, with a particular focus on labor market regulation and the gig and sharing economy. His current work examines the effects of short-term rental regulations on the hotel industry. He is also studying how banning noncompete agreements impacts inexperienced and less-educated workers.

Noara Razzak is a Ph.D. candidate in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University. She is an applied microeconomist working on financial markets and community banking with additional interests in industrial organization, urban economics and applied econometrics. Her job market paper studies the effect of Minority Depository Institutions' branch closures in their local markets. She has presented her research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Mentoring and Advancing Ph.D. (PFMAP) Program, Carolina Region Empirical Economics Day in UNC Charlotte, 2nd Women in Central Banking Workshop at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Brown Bag Seminar within the Supervisory Research and Analysis Unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Fintech and Financial Institutions Research Conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Noara has also been selected as an Emerging Scholar at the Community Banking Research Conference (CBRC) 2024, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. She expects to graduate in May 2026. Noara earned her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in 2012, where she majored in physics and comparative literature.

About Myles Wallace

Myles S. Wallace was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1946. After serving in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, he received his Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Colorado. He began his teaching 27-year career in the Clemson Economics Department in 1980. Professor Wallace was a sophisticated economic thinker with a free-market bent. He relished taking the opposite side of any argument just to see where it would go. He had great intuition about how individuals respond to incentives and how markets work.

Beneath his sometimes gruff exterior, Professor Wallace had a heart of gold. He was always ready to help other faculty with their research and engage them with his work. He worked tirelessly to see that graduate students completed their programs. Much of his work was co-authored with other faculty and graduate students. All of his co-authors would agree that Professor Wallace made them better economists. Professor Wallace added immensely to the department's reputation.

His main research interest was applied macroeconomics, where he specialized in empirical testing of the validity of prevailing theories about how the macroeconomy worked. To do so, he utilized modern econometric techniques to study government spending and taxation, inflation and interest rates, real wages and employment over the business cycle, inflation and deficit spending and inflation and exchange rates. His work was published in such journals as the Journal of Macroeconomics, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking and the Journal of International Money and Finance.

Professor Wallace and his former Colorado professor, Robert McNown, made two important contributions to testing procedures in macro-econometrics. One is related to a procedure called "first-differencing," which is often used to eliminate autocorrelation in regression analysis. They proved that first-differencing is an improper procedure when the variables in the analysis are "random walks." This important work was published in the Review of Economics and Statistics. A second is related to detecting random walks with panel data. This highly cited work was published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economic Statistics.

Professor Wallace regularly taught undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics, monetary economics and international trade. He also developed courses in applied macro-econometrics for graduate students and applied time-series analysis for MBA students. Rather than teaching high-brow theory, his courses were aimed at teaching students how to use modern statistical methods to get answers to real-world problems. He was a challenging but much-loved and respected professor.

Professor Wallace was an international ambassador for the department and for Clemson University. He enjoyed traveling and teaching abroad. His foreign teaching stents included the Central European University in Hungary, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France, and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. On these stents, he recruited many students to the department's graduate program. Many of these students are now teaching in U. S. universities and universities abroad, where they have continued to spread the word about the Clemson Economics Department. The department's graduate program now enjoys a strong reputation nationally and internationally, and Professor Wallace deserves much credit for cultivating this reputation.

Professor Wallace passed away in March 2016. He is missed, but he will never be forgotten.