Luke Schafer ‘23

Luke Schafer is a senior from Williamston, Michigan double majoring in economics and global affairs with a minor in constitutional studies. He formerly researched alongside Professor John Firth of the economics department and focused on development economics on the Indian Subcontinent. In this capacity, Schafer learned about gold-backed lending within the Indian economy and examined various data sets and surveys to discover how a surge in gold-backed lending was affecting the Indian economy.

This year, Schafer is writing a capstone essay for his international development studies concentration within the global affairs major. He received a Kellogg Institute research grant to spend the summer in Santiago, Chile conducting his own independent research on the Chilean constitutional rewrite. Schafer is very interested in constitutional law and, within the Chilean context, was particularly interested in how university students viewed their country’s constitutional process. He looks forward to using his research to write a capstone, and hopes to provide clues as to why the Chilean constitutional process turned out the way it did.