Author: kak11010

Karl Case to speak on housing markets

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This year, AGES has invited Karl Case, Katherine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, and co-developer of the widely used Case-Shiller Housing Price Index, to give a public talk on “Housing Prices and the Real Economy.” The event will be held at the UConn Dodd Center on Tuesday, April 14th, 11 AM.

This event is this year’s instalment of the AGES Distinguished Speaker Series. Previous editions features Nobel Prize winner Finn Kydland, Ariel Rubinstein and Gregory Mankiw.

Update: For a write-up about Karl Case’s presentation on the CLAS website, click here.

Current PhD student and two recent graduates to publish in Economic Inquiry

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Current Ph.D. student Marina-Selini Katsaiti (IDEAS) and recent graduates Philip Shaw (IDEAS) and Marius Jurgilas (IDEAS), all advised by Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS), will publish a paper entitled “Corruption and Growth Under Weak Identification” in the journal Economic Inquiry. This paper reviews the recent literature in econometrics that focuses on identification and statistical inference when a researcher has weakly correlated instruments variables. In light of this recent theoretical work in econometrics, it analyses a highly influential article in economics and finds that the original results of this article are misleading. It then updates the original analysis and shows that there is no relationship between corruption and economic growth or investment, which is contrary to the results of the original article. The paper also suggests that the problem of weak instruments in the corruption literature may not be isolated to a single article but instead the entire empirical literature that tries to find a causal link between corruption and economic growth or investment. The paper contributes also to the literature by demonstrating how researchers can “deal” with the problem of weak identification.

Prof. Ross presents his research on mortgage lending discrimination at the Cleveland Fed

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Professor Ross presented his research on mortgage lending discrimination as part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s conference on the Community Reinvestment Act on Feb 6, 2009. Professor Ross discussed the lessons learned from his research concerning the Boston Fed study and a major paired testing study of mortgage lending discrimination conducted by the Urban Institute. Professor Ross also discussed his experiences working as a consultant on a Fair Lending case for the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Professor Ross emphasized that a much of the discrimination in the mortgage market occurs because of the discretion available to individual loan officers or mortgage brokers, and discrimination is often non-existent at lenders that have good command and control systems. He recommended that fair lending investigations focus on lenders’ entire business model as opposed to just their fair lending monitoring systems.

For more see the Cleveland Fed website.

CLAS faculty snapshot features Richard Langlois

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Prof. Langlois (IDEAS), who has been at UConn since 1983, studies the economics of organization – that is, why entities such as business firms are organized in a particular way. In the late 19th century, mass production of goods and the vertical integration of companies radically transformed the economy. In the late 20th century, independent suppliers and market coordination were more effective than large, vertically integrated corporations. Langlois argues that the type of organization that succeeds depends on the conditions of the economy at the time.

Listen to the podcast of this snapshot.

Prof. Ray presents series of workshops in India

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During the recent winter break, UConn Economics professor, Subhash Ray (IDEAS), conducted a series of workshops in different parts of India. Professor Ray’s special area of expertise is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a nonparametric mathematical technique designed to evaluate the productivity and efficiency of both private and public enterprises. DEA addresses fundamental questions about how well decision-making units transform scarce inputs into valuable outputs, and even provides useful guidance on how to improve performance.

Professor Ray is one of the world’s leading experts on DEA, and his book (Data Envelopment Analysis: Theory and Techniques for Economics and Operations Research), published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press, has been heralded by other researchers in the field.

His tour included a 3-day workshop on Performance Measurement held at Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The January 2-4 workshop included three extended lectures on DEA, supplemented by hands-on, computer-based tutorials. Professor Ray was joined by Professor Subal Kumbhakar of Binghamton University (SUNY), who lectured on an alternative method of efficiency measurement known as Stochastic Frontier Analysis. Workshop attendees included corporate users of DEA as well as academic researchers.

Immediately after the Mumbai workshop, Professor Ray delivered a keynote address and two lectures on DEA at an international conference on efficiency evaluation (January 5-7), hosted by the Delhi School of Economics. Professor Ray also was asked to serve as an international member of the conference organizing committee.

On January 11-13, Professor Ray again was joined by Professor Kumbhakar to conduct a teaching workshop on efficiency analysis at the Madras School of Economics in Chennai (formerly Madras).

Through these workshops, and similar events over the years, Professor Ray has trained a cadre of young scholars who have contributed to productivity research and the further development of DEA.

Prof. Minkler publishes book

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Lanse Minkler‘s (IDEAS) recent book, Integrity and Agreement: Economics When Principles Also Matter, argues that moral principles— not mere self-interest—drives rational decision making. Starting with the elementary principle “lying is wrong,” Minkler examines the ways in which a sense of morality guides real-life decision making. Whether one feels committed to specific or general moral principles, Minkler explains, integrity demands consistently acting on that commitment. Because truthfulness is the most basic moral principle, integrity means honesty. And honesty extends beyond truth-telling. It requires good faith when entering an agreement and then standing by one’s word. From this premise, Minkler explores the implications of integrity for contracts between buyers and sellers and understandings between employers and employees. He also finds a role for integrity in an individual’s religious vows, an elected official’s accountability to constituents, and a community’s obligation to human rights.

Commenting on the book, Geoffrey Hodgson, Research Professor in Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics writes: “Facing massive evidence that people do not act generally as self-regarding payoff maximizers, economists have become increasingly interested in issues of cooperation, altruism, identity, and morality. Lanse Minkler’s contribution is particularly important because of his powerful argument that the evidence of cooperation cannot be explained adequately by a more complicated preference function. A disposition for honesty is not simply a matter of preference—it is an issue of personal integrity, identity, and commitment. This has major implications. In particular we have to reconstruct the theory of the firm from first principles. No economist committed to the pursuit of truth should ignore this volume.”

You can find out more about Integrity and Agreement at University of Michigan Press.

That book follows on the heels of Minkler’s co-edited volume, Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, and Policy Issues. This edited volume offers new scholarship on economic rights by leading scholars in the fields of economics, law, and political science. It analyzes the central features of economic rights: their conceptual, measurement, and policy dimensions. In its introduction, the book provides a new conceptualization of economic rights based on a three-pronged definition: the right to a decent standard of living, the right to work, and the right to basic income support for people who cannot work. Subsequent chapters correct existing conceptual mistakes in the literature, provide new measurement techniques with country rankings, and analyze policy implementation at the international, regional, national, and local levels. While it forms a cohesive whole, the book is nevertheless rich in contending perspectives.

You can find out more about Economic Rights at Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Ross publishes in Journal of Political Economy

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Professor Ross‘s (IDEAS) study “Place of Work/Place of Residence” with Patrick Bayer at Duke and Giorgio Topa and the NY Federal Reserve was published in the Journal of Political Economy in December (UConn working paper version). The Journal of Political Economy is considered to be one of the top three journals in Economics. This paper provides strong evidence that individual’s success in the labor market is influenced by their immediate neighbors, and that this influence is larger when the neighbors share key traits, such as both having children, being similar in age, or having similar levels of education, possibly because they are more likely to share information about jobs with each other. Individuals whose neighbors have such similar traits are more successful in the labor market having higher employment rates and earnings.

A key feature of the study is its design that is intended to approximate what someone might obtain from a randomized experiment. We use the detailed geography available in confidential census data so that we can control for neighborhoods and then examine whether the attributes of someone’s immediate neighbors within the broader neighborhood have a disproportionate impact on their outcomes. We assert and then demonstrate for key attributes that once households have chosen a neighborhood they appear to be almost randomly distributed across blocks within that neighborhood, which is the source of our quasi-experimental variation.

PhD student to publish paper in Journal of Sports Economics

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Economics PhD student Brian Volz, advised by Thomas Miceli, has been a fan of baseball his entire life and spent much of his free time as an undergraduate playing baseball. As a graduate student at UConn he has been lucky enough to incorporate his favorite leisure activity into his study of labor economics.

His paper “Minority Status and Managerial Survival in Major League Baseball” was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Sports Economics. The paper began as a project for one of his PhD field courses and was expanded and revised over the past two years into an economics department working paper and eventually a journal submission. The paper was motivated by the relatively small number of minority managers in a league with a relatively large percentage of minority players. The paper examines the impact of minority status on the survival of Major League Baseball managers in order to determine if discrimination in managerial retention is to blame for the lack of minority managers. In order to answer this question data envelopment analysis, which he was introduced to in Professor Ray‘s (IDEAS) Productivity Analysis course, and survival time analysis are applied to performance and survival data from the 1985 to 2006 baseball seasons. It is shown that when controlling for performance and personal characteristics minorities are on average 9.6% points more likely to return the following season. Additionally, it is shown that winning percentage has no impact on managerial survival when the efficiency of the manager is controlled for.

BA Alumna named advisor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that she has named Karen Wayland as her new Policy Advisor for energy; Anne Cannon MacMillan as her new Policy Advisor for agriculture, veterans, small business and rural outreach; and Bridget Fallon as her new Director of Protocol and Special Events. All three begin their duties this month.

Congress cannot function without the dedication and hard work of Americans who put public service ahead of private gain. The hard work completed by staff is an integral part of making the Congress work for the American people, Pelosi said. I welcome our talented new additions to the Speakers Office and look forward to working together as we continue to move America in a New Direction.

Karen Wayland currently serves as Legislative Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Wayland holds a dual Ph.D. in Geology and Resource Development from Michigan State University, a masters degree in Natural Resources Management and Engineering and a bachelors in Economics from the University of Connecticut.