Interview with Professor Anand Butler
Professor Anand Butler arrived at Trinity in Fall 2025. He currently teaches ECON 101 Basic Economic Principles, ECON 205 Discrimination, Inequality, and Policy in Markets, and ECON 303 Labor Economics.
Q: How did you become interested in economics?
AB: During my freshman year in college, I took an introductory economics course which I found extremely boring. Only a cancelled class that spring along with an insistent friend led to me taking a second economics course. The professor devoted a lot of time to talking about what economists actually do and the questions they try to answer professionally. This included a lot of questions that I was deeply intrigued by about how we live and interact as a society. It inspired me enough to continue through further courses, and it was in an upper-level seminar where we just read economics papers and debated their merits that I realized I was fascinated by economics and wanted to develop research professionally.
Q: Briefly describe a recent paper.
AB: Right now I am working to publish the first chapter of my graduate school dissertation. It focuses on the impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws on labor markets. RTW limits the ability of unions to compel beneficiaries of their contracts to pay them compensatory fees, limiting their funding and reducing their negotiating power. I find that, as one might expect, relative to similar areas that do not implement these laws, RTW leads to decreases in union membership as well as unions engaging in an employment-wages tradeoff. Somewhat unexpectedly, I find that business dynamism actually drops. The number of firms and in particular the number of new firms and new firm applications all drop, suggesting that any benefits accruing on the demand side are to incumbent firms at the cost of business dynamism.
Q: Tell us about some elective courses are you teaching in the next academic year, and what are these courses about?
AB: I will be teaching ECON 303 Labor Economics which will focus on labor markets. I will also be teaching ECON 205 on discrimination, inequality, and how they manifest themselves in markets. We’ll get to cover how these have evolved over time, what policies have been effective (and which haven’t), and where discrimination is most pertinent in the United States today. I think a lot of students come away from economics courses, particularly after taking an intro class or intermediate micro, believing that economists think most markets are close to perfectly competitive. If that seems unrealistic or hard to square with the world you experience around you, I think you’ll enjoy either of these courses. We get to talk about what certain markets really look like (oligopolistic, plagued by information asymmetries, etc.) and how these characteristics lead to many of the difficult experiences people have in making some of their most important decisions (what job you will take, whether you can buy a home, how you will structure your family). Furthermore, both classes will spend time focusing on policy and what it does for these markets — which by extension means what it does for your income or ability to get a loan. Finally, while there will be a little more in the labor course, both classes will expose you to real research and the ways in which economists are trying to understand more about labor markets and issues of discrimination or inequality. If you think what is covered in economics isn’t realistic enough, these might be the courses for you!
