While the department is not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty!
This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Shuo Han Samuel Jackson Tamara Shelley Grace Smith Khoa Tran Yinuo Xiang Ziyun Zhou
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Nidhi Nair SeSe Nguyen
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Nadine Fernando
Prasad Gosavi
Pin Lyi Choyang Wang
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Adem Aksoy
Allen Cazeau Jeremy Salyer
Benjamin Scudder
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Erin McKeehan
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Shuyi Bian
Charles Triano Scholarship
John Doran Beatrix Jordan
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Erik Choi Ryan Durrel Gregory Elmokian Kevin Gabree Prabhas KC Joshua Waxman Justin Wu
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Annaliesa Wood
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Cole Ensinger Jordan Leonardi
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Ruohan Huang
Ziyun Wu
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Lindsey Buck
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Matthew Brown
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Kunze Li
Lulin Li
Ghania Shuaib
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Economics Department General Scholarship
Anastassiya Karaban
Best Third Year Paper Award
Jiaqi Wang
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Heshan Zhang
CLAS Summer Fellowship
Erdal Asker
Matthew Brown
Jingyun Chen
Jinsoon Cho
Zhenhao Gong
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Lulin Li
Yizhi Zhu
Recent PhD graduate Fei Zou has published “Does Early Retirement Really Benefit Women?” in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
This paper grew out of Fei’s PhD dissertation completed at UConn (2019) under the supervision of Professor Kai Zhao. It is a joint work with Dr. Hyun Lee (former UConn faculty), and Professor Zhao.
In this paper, the authors quantitatively evaluate the welfare consequences of China’s gender-specific mandatory retirement policy using a calibrated overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. They find that while it is intended to relieve women from work earlier and to provide them with more years of public pensions benefits than men, early mandatory retirement reduces welfare for women.
The published version of this paper can be found at:
Nursing homes are really struggling. We all witnessed the devastating number of Covid deaths in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Now, nursing homes are toiling with labor shortages that make it very difficult to provide adequate care for residents. While the immediate impacts of the pandemic will eventually stabilize, in the coming decades, nursing homes will need to cope with increases in the demand for their services as baby boomers age. How will an industry that has struggled to hire and keep enough workers even before the pandemic be able to address the increasing care needs of an aging population?
One potential solution: A more open immigration policy. Professor Delia Furtado’s new research shows that nursing homes in areas receiving more immigrants are able to provide better quality care for residents. She talked about why this might be on The Indicator Podcast. Part of this interview aired on All Things Considered.
In related work, PhD student Treena Goswami finds that older college-educated native-born women remain in the labor force longer when they live in areas with more immigrants. Her analysis suggests that when immigrants are available to provide inexpensive care-giving or housekeeping services, older women (who can afford these services) do not have to prematurely leave the labor force in order to provide full time care for loved ones. Further evidence that policies allowing for more immigration might help the U.S. address the care-giving needs of an aging population.
Leshui completed his thesis at UConn in 2013 under the supervision of Professors Richard Langlois, Robert Gibbons, Christian Zimmermann, and Vicki Knoblauch.
He started his position as an Assistant Professor at Bates College in 2015, and works primarily in the fields of organizational economics and industrial organization. He is also working on research projects on education with Professor Stephen L. Ross.
While the department is not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty! This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Jasmine Kuyateh-Banks
Melissa Mendez
Kelly-Anne Moffa
Joslin Valiyaveettil
Clare Wieduwilt
Linge Yang
Michael Zhu
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Lauren Pawlowski
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Ryan Durrell
Cole Ensinger
Yue Sun
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Kader Akpinar
Susan Bailey
Prasad Gosavi
SeSe Nguyen
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Brendan Adams
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Linge Yang
Charles Triano Scholarship
Matthew Petridis
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Kelly-Anne Moffa
Benjamin Scudder
Kira Smith
Alexander Taylor
Joslin Valiyaveettil
Clare Wieduwilt
Michael Zhu
Robert J. Monte Scholarship
Isadore Johnson
Ross Mayer Scholarship
John Peterson
Ajshe Zulfi
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Jinsoon Cho
Jingwei Huang
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Miranda Mendiola Valdez
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Yijia Gao
Anastassiya Karaban
Ha Kyeong Lee
Kunze Li
Ghania Shuaib
Jiaqi Wang
Yangkeun Yun
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Umesh Ghimire
Economics Department General Scholarship
Tiange Du
Xuejian Gong
Ruohan Huang
Benjamin Taraskevich
Ziyun Wu
Yizhi Zhu
Best Third Year Paper Award
Lindsey Buck, awarded for her paper “Head Start Improves Health and Welfare 25 Years After Participation”
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Faisal Algosair
Abdulmohsen Almuhaisen
Erdal Asker
Birenda Budha
Dingxian Cao
Jingyun Chen
Zhenhao Gong
Treena Goswami
Huarui Jing
Chuang Li
Chun Li
Xizi Li
Tongan Liu
Deepak Saraswat
Rui Sun
Victor Volkman
Jinning Wang
Haoxiang Xu
Heli Xu
Heshan Zhang
Wei Zheng
Aaron Cooke, a 2018 PhD graduate of the UConn Department of Economics, recently became the Chief Economist for Macroeconomic Policy at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
The CEA, an agency within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy.
Aaron earned his PhD degree from the Department of Economics in 2018, specializing in macroeconomics and public policy. His PhD dissertation, “Three Essays on Wealth and Income Inequality”, studied the causes of U.S. wealth and income inequality, and was completed under the supervision of Professor Kai Zhao.
Prior to joining the CEA, Aaron was an economist at the Office of Management and Budget.
“The work incentive created by the Earned Income Tax Credit has been the subject of extensive study for decades now, with generally positive results. The pro-work potential of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), in contrast, has been relatively ignored.
A new job market paper fromWei Zheng, a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, attempts to fill this gap in the literature. Using event study and simulation techniques, Zheng provides new and detailed estimates of the effect of the Child Tax Credit on maternal labor supply. The headline finding: a $1000 increase in the average CTC is associated with a 1.1 percentage pointincreasein labor force participation for single mothers.”
Recent graduate Ria Bhattacharya (PhD 2019) has published an article “COVID-19: G-20’s Response to Education” in the August 2020 volume of G-20 Digest.
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education. It discusses G20 current status in the education sector and its response to COVID-19 impact on education. The paper highlights the challenges thrust upon the G20 economies concerning education, a crucial sector in any economy. Currently, there are over 23 million confirmed cases globally, with the United States leading the death count at 176000 deaths and counting, due to COVID-19. As the entire world braces itself for a severe recession comparable to the Great Depression which will have long-lasting effects on every sector of the global economy, we examine how G20 nations can provide leadership in provision of education during the current crisis.
Professor Jorge Agüero and third year PhD student Miranda Mendiola’s proposal “Role models: Information and Gender Stereotypes” for a pilot project, sponsored by the Innovation Laboratory for Cost-Effective Educational Policy – MineduLAB in the Peruvian Ministry of Education, has been approved.
Their project has the objective of reducing gender stereotypes and improving grades for high school students through the use of role models. Traditionally, efforts to reduce gender gaps have focused on empowering women. Professor Agüero and Miranda’s project focuses on changing the perception of both genders’ abilities by showing students movies that have young main characters being successful in careers that are nontraditional for their gender. They hope to improve women’s scores in STEM courses, where they traditionally perform worse, and also to improve men’s scores in courses they traditionally struggle with (Spanish and history). They will measure changes in gender bias through a questionnaire and a game, with the objective of measuring both explicit and implicit biases.
This project will hopefully be a pilot for a larger project in Peru, aiding in the reduction of gender bias in Peruvian schools.