Author: kak11010

Prof. Kimenyi joined by PhD Alum at Brookings

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Prof. Kimenyi is currently a Senior Fellow at the Brookings institution where he is working for the Africa Growth Initiative. He has recently been joined there by Ezra Suruma, a 1976 Economics PhD from UConn who completed his dissertation under the supervision of Morris Singer.

After his PhD, Suruma taught at Florida A&M University, Makerere University (Uganda) and Coppin State University (Maryland), at the latter as department head. He then started an administrative career in Uganda, first at the (central) bank of Uganda, 1987 as the Director of Research, 1990 as Deputy Governor. After various stints in commercial banks, in 2005, he was appointed 2005 as Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development of Uganda. In 2008, he received from The Banker (Financial Times, UK) an award as the best Finance Minister in Africa. Since 2009, he has been a Senior Presidential Advisor for Finance and Planning.

At Brookings, Kimenyi and Suruma are trying trying to influence development policy both in Africa and the United States and OECD. They interact also regularly with policy makers at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and other development institutions and foundations that focus on development. Prof. Kimenyi is in particular pushing for a food security initiatives and overall transformation of African Agriculture. He is also working on natural resource management and industrial policies. Ezra Suruma is writing a book on the growth success story in Uganda over the last decade.

Read more at the East African.

Economics alumnus runs for Senate seat

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Noted economist, fund manager, entrepreneur, race car builder, and UCONN alumnus Warren Mosler is seeking the office of US Senate to add ‘fixed the US economy’ to his long list of accomplishments. Mosler, a native of Connecticut who graduated from Storrs with a B. A. in Economics in 1971 is running for the US Senate seat being vacated by Senator Christopher Dodd.

Since graduation, Warren has spent 37 years in various financial institutions from Manchester, Hartford, New York, Chicago, and South Florida, including the founding III Offshore Advisors in 1982 and, in 1983, AVM L.P., a broker/dealer providing advanced financial services to large institutional clients. During these years he developed numerous investing strategies utilizing US Government securities and created the mortgage swap and euro swap futures contract. He maintains strong connections to the academic world as Co-Founder, along with L. Randall Wray, of the Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Mosler also has supported research projects and graduate students at the London School of Economics, the New School, Harvard University, and the University of Newcastle, Australia. Additionally, Warren is an Associate Fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Warren is the author of numerous publications, of which the latest is ‘The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy’ (Mosler, 2010), which challenges several contemporary assumptions about the relationship between government spending, federal debt, and taxation and opens the door to an immediate return to economic prosperity.

Warren is the original contemporary proponent of what has come to be called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). MMT begins with the operational fact that Federal taxes serve to regulate aggregate demand, rather than to raise revenue per se, and that funds to pay Federal taxes indeed originate from government spending itself. Warren’s campaign platform is based on three proposals designed to fix the nation’s economy within 90 days. The three proposals are as follows:


  1. Declare a “payroll tax holiday” where the U.S. Treasury will suspend deduction of all FICA taxes. That means the take home pay of someone earning $50,000 a year will rise by approximately $325 per month, fixing the economy from the bottom up, vs the current top-down bailout method.
  2. An unrestricted $500 per capita Federal revenue sharing distribution to all the State governments. This proposal mean about $1.75 billion for Connecticut.
  3. Fund an $8/hr. National Service Jobs program for anyone willing and able to work to facilitate the transition from unemployment to private sector employment, as the first two proposals will cause the large increases in private sectors business sales that quickly translates into the millions of new jobs we desperately need.

Since leaving Connecticut for Wall Street in 1976, Warren has lived and worked in New York City, Chicago, South Florida, and the US Virgin Islands. Additionally, while in Florida, he founded Mosler Automotive, which produces the world’s top performing sport cars. Warren returned to Connecticut this year to run for the US Senate solely as a matter of conscience, and not ambition. He sees himself as uniquely qualified to fix the economic problems facing the US economy.

Mikhael Shor to join department

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Mikhael Shor, currently Assistant Professor of Economics at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, will be joining the department in Fall 2011. He specializes in the study of behavioral game theory and its applications to firm-level decision making. Professor Shor has authored many scholarly articles on auctions, behavioral aspects of marketing, and electronic commerce. His research has appeared in such journals as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Management Information Systems, Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Psychology, and Contemporary Accounting Research. He has participated in merger analysis and strategic game theory consulting for the Federal Trade Commission and several companies. research interests are in game theory, industrial organization, and experimental economics. His current theoretical research is on the implications of mergers in auction markets, and my experimental research (supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health) is on decision making when faced with an overwhelming number of options.

Professor Shor has taught game theory, industrial organization, pricing strategies, economics of networks, and law and economics. His educational innovations and materials have been featured in Science, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Shor holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD from Rutgers University. He is living in Coventry with two kids, Eliana and Jacob, and a soon-to-be-added pound puppy. His wife is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at UConn.

Emeritus Steve Sacks reports on life after retirement

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There have been some rough times: lots of nights sleeping in a homeless shelter and quite a bit of time in jail. But in the end it’s worked out well, and now we’re comfortably settled in a small but very pleasant apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

This year I’ve cut down to one night a month at the homeless shelter, but when one of the other volunteers doesn’t show up, I may put in an extra night on short notice. I can’t say it’s fun, setting up cots for the “guests” and serving dinner, then sleeping on a cheap cot in an overheated hallway where there’s always a light on, and then getting up at 5:30 a.m. But there’s considerable satisfaction in knowing that I’m playing a small part in providing a safe, warm, dry night to some people who’ve had bad luck.

Let me explain about the time I spent in jail. My part in a project to study average time from arrest to arraignment in Manhattan started with a phone call from a consulting firm in Cambridge. Over a period of about 20 years, I had worked frequently with this firm to develop software intended to optimize patrol patterns for police cars in urban areas. In this new project for the New York City Office of Criminal Justice, we were asked to create a computer simulation of the steps taken from the time an arrest is made until the accused is brought before a judge. In New York, the law says that arraignment before a judge must occur no more than 24 hours after an arrest. During that time quite a lot has to happen: finger prints must be taken and sent to Albany and to the FBI, a database of arrest warrants must be searched to find out if the accused is wanted in another part of the state or in any of the other 49 states, the Attorney General’s office must decide whether to recommend bail and must write up formal charges, an affidavit has to be written and signed by the arresting officer, in many cases a Legal Aid attorney must be called in, … The amount of paperwork is substantial and the appropriate documents must be in the right place at the right time. Then, too, the prisoner must be in the right place at the right time, and that involves moving him or her from the scene of the offense to the precinct to holding cells to the courtroom. All of this has to be completed within 24 hours or the Civil Liberties Union gets upset. (Sometimes, on a busy day, the 24-hour limit is exceeded.)

The purpose of our simulation is to give criminal justice planners a tool that lets them do what-if analysis: what would happen to the process if more fingerprint clerks were hired? suppose we increase the number of printers available for downloading warrants from Albany? would it matter if we did the medical exam after the fingerprinting instead of before? would the whole process be faster if we built more holding cells under the courthouse? Experimenting with the virtual reality of this analytical tool is an alternative to actually hiring more people, really changing procedures, or physically building more cells. The goal is to find the most effective, and least expensive, modifications to a set of interconnected queues so as to reduce the total time a prisoner is in the system.

In order to create an accurate simulation, we needed to have a very complete understanding of how the system works. We spent months studying every detail. Since I live in New York, I was part of the team that spent a lot of time behind bars, mostly in the basement of Manhattan’s central courthouse. Now that our project is finished, I don’t spend any time in jail, but there were many days when I was in fact inside. To step through those metal gates and hear them snap closed behind me was a sobering experience, even though I was pretty sure that they would let me out. We also sat behind a judge in a courtroom as he dealt with a rapid-fire series of defendants, lawyers, and Assistant Attorneys General. All of this was a real education for me, endlessly fascinating.

I realize now that I haven’t said anything about how I spend most of my time in retirement. But that must be obvious if you know that I live in New York city, where there’s theatre, concerts, movies, museums, readings, ethnic neighborhoods to explore, Brooklyn’s magnificent Promenade to stroll along, swimming (yes, there are swimming pools in New York city), yoga classes, … Retirement is terrific. Everyone should do it.

I miss Storrs and the people there. But I’m glad that we have made this big move. Living in New York continues to be an exciting adventure. Occasionally, we get back to Connecticut for a visit and sometimes old friends come to New York. Most important, making new friends here didn’t take as long as I had feared, even in a city of eight million people.

New class set to graduate

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On Saturday May 8, 2010, a new class of students will walk in the commencement ceremonies and get well-deserved degrees. As there are no December ceremonies any more, the walking class in larger than usual. 212 students will be receiving the BA in Economics, of which 40 are double majors. Seven students will be graduating with Honors in Economics: Joseph Antelmi, Michael Bokoff, Taylor Brown, Charles Johnson, Bryan Murphy, Eric Roy, and William Watson. The Economics major is very popular on campus, in previous years it has been the third most sought after. Note also that among all Economics degree granting institutions in the United States, the University of Connecticut ranks 26th by the number of degrees conferred last year.

We also have a graduating class in our graduate programs. Are graduating with a MA: Jay Adams, Demet Cimen, Amy Druckenmiller, Elnara Eynullayeva, Elizabeth Kaletski, Xingkang Liu, Xiaoyin Shen, Rijesh Shrestha, Li Wang, Menxi Ying and He Zang. And with a PhD: Lei Chen, Onur Burak Celik, Marina-Selini Katsaiti, Monica Lopez-Anuarbe, Zinnia Mukherjee and Natalya Shelkova.

Prof. Cosgel named department head

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Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), has announced that Prof. Metin Cosgel has been named head of the department of Economics, starting July 1, 2010. He says:

Professor Cosgel has been a member of the CLAS faculty since Fall of 1989. He has written extensively on the political economy of religion and has an ongoing project to study the economic history of the Ottoman Empire. In 2007, he received the Barkan Article Prize for the best article in the field of Ottoman and Turkish Studies awarded by the Turkish Studies Association. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal “Economic History of Developing Regions” and is a CLAS representative to the Provost’s International Executive Council.

Professor Couch Associate Editor of Journal of Income Distribution

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Professor Kenneth Couch recently joined the Journal of Income Distribution as an Associate Editor. The Journal of Income Distribution has an international readership and is based in Canada. The purpose of the Journal of Income Distribution is to foster scholarly research internationally into all aspects of income distribution. The Journal supports theoretical, empirical, and technical studies pertaining to income distribution research and its methodologies. The editorial board of the journal includes leading scholars in the area of income distribution. Professor Couch also serves as an Editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Phi Beta Kappa Welcomes New Initiates

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Founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary, Phi Beta Kappa is an undergraduate honors society that celebrates excellence in the liberal arts. Its long list of distinguished members—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, President Theodore Roosevelt, etc.—just got a little longer. UConn’s Epsilon Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa recently added 8 senior Economic majors to its list of members: Joseph Antelmi, Michael Samuel Bokoff, Tyler David Gold, John R. Harry, Yixian Lai, Margaret Lynn McCarthy, Eric Burton Roy, and Alex Keller Upton. The Department of Economics congratulates this group of outstanding students.

Prof. Furtado publishes in AER P&P

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In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Prof. Delia Furtado and coauthor, Heinrich Hock (Mathematica Policy Research), explore the role of immigration in explaining the labor supply and fertility decisions of high-education U.S. native women. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that low-skilled immigration decreases the price of childcare services, making it easier for career-minded women to combine work and family. The authors find that large inflows of immigrants to a city attenuate the negative relationship between female labor force participation and fertility, which translates into an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home.

Relative to women in most other developed countries, American women have very high rates of labor force participation and fertility. This is especially remarkable given how many countries have family leave and subsidy policies that are far more generous than those in the United States. The results in this paper point to immigration as a partial explanation for this phenomenon. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skill native women. Prof. Furtado plans to continue this line of research in future work.

Each May, the AER Papers and Proceedings publishes a sampling of the papers presented at the Annual Meeting of American Economics Association. A working paper version of the article is available here.

Shadow economies under the volcano ash cloud

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PhD student Catalina Granda-Carvajal (advisor, prof. Zimmermann) has been invited to present last week in an international workshop in Germany, “Shadow Economy, Tax Policy and Labor Markets in International Comparison: Options for Economic Policy“. This workshop was held at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, with the aim to demonstrate advances in the analysis of shadow economic activity and discuss how these can be used for better economic policies. Granda’s paper, entitled “The Unofficial Economy and the Business Cycle: A Test for Theories”, uses official data to establish a set of business cycle features and study how they vary across countries with the size of the unofficial sector, and compares these empirical regularities with the predictions of existing theories on macroeconomic fluctuations in economies featuring underground activities.

After having the chance to exchange ideas with young scholars and with some of the world experts in the field, Granda has been faced with the uncertainty imposed by the volcanic ash cloud in Iceland. Being stuck in Berlin has not been an easy situation; however, she reports “I have spent some time sightseeing, visiting museums and, overall, taking advantage of such a ‘forced tourism’. With plenty of history while trying to stand as a leader in arts and promoting Western values, now I understand why this city is one of the most exciting places in Europe. All in all, I cannot complain, but I cannot wait for the flight back to Storrs to share with my friends and colleagues how this experience has enriched my life and view of things.”