Author: kak11010

Economist Named to Austin Chair

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Another story about Segerson’s Austin Chair, this time from the UConn Foundation:

When Philip E. Austin announced his retirement from the University presidency in 2007, longtime donors quickly came together to create a lasting tribute and preserve his legacy of service. In keeping with Austin’s dedication to education and research, a $1.5-million endowed chair was created in his name to memorialize his tenure and support the work of a nationally renowned scholar. The University of Connecticut’s Board of Trustees recently awarded the chair to Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), a highly regarded professor of economics with 22 years at UConn.

Specializing in law and the environment, Segerson is at the cutting edge of scholarly inquiry and research into some of the most pressing questions of the twenty-first century. She is an expert in three areas critical to the future: natural resource and environmental economics; law and economics; and applied microeconomics. Support through the Philip E. Austin Endowed Chair will enable her to delve deeper into these focus areas.

“This position will allow me to enhance my own research on the links between economics and the environment and the design of public policies to address environmental problems. It will increase my ability to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges, which are essential in my research,” says Segerson.

She also notes that the endowment will have effects beyond her own research.

“The position brings recognition not only to the University but to the economics department as well,” she explains. “I hope the chair can be used to advance the contributions of the department, through, for example, fostering exchanges related to a variety of public policy issues, such as education, health care and housing.”

Segerson joined UConn as a visiting assistant professor in 1986. She holds a joint appointment in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where she headed the Department of Economics from 2001 to 2005, and the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

In 2007, she was appointed to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Last year, she was selected to be a fellow of both the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

As a nationally recognized expert, Segerson’s counsel has been requested on a number of government and professional committees, including an expert panel on climate change economics for the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Her teaching and accomplishments have earned her recognition from students and colleagues alike. Segerson has received the Most Appreciated Faculty Award from the Association of Graduate Economics Students three times. She also has received the Research Excellence Award from the UConn chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching from the UConn Alumni Association.

Segerson earned a B.A. in mathematics from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in environmental natural resource economics from Cornell University.

As UConn’s thirteenth president, Austin led the University through a period of remarkable transition from 1996 to 2007. He oversaw UConn’s dramatic physical transformation and steep rise in national prominence for academic excellence. Austin’s tenure also was marked by a fivefold growth of the endowment.

“It is a real honor to be appointed to a chair that was endowed in recognition of President Austin’s many contributions to the University of Connecticut. Under his leadership, the University made great strides forward, and I am very pleased to be a part of honoring his legacy,” says Segerson.

Maintain a ‘can-do’ attitude, speaker (MA Econ) tells winter graduates

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Approach life with a positive attitude, protect your health, and be personally accountable. That’s the advice businessman and philanthropist Denis McCarthy gave to students at UConn’s winter commencement exercises in Gampel Pavilion on Dec. 14.

About 800 students – including more than half who earned their degrees from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – were joined by friends and family members for the ceremony.

Having a positive attitude in life helps build self-confidence, McCarthy told the crowd. “Certainly you have to be realistic depending on the subject or circumstance, but having that ‘can do’ attitude will help you be enthusiastic and passionate about what you do professionally,” he said. “Those are two excellent leadership skills.”

McCarthy is the retired chairman, CEO, and president of Fidelity Management Trust Co., a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s leading providers of financial services. During the ceremony, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

McCarthy earned a bachelor’s degree in finance at UConn in 1964, and a master’s degree in economics in 1965. He is co-chair of UConn’s capital campaign and a member of the UConn Foundation board of directors, which he chaired from 2000-2004.

Read more at UConn Advance

Prof. Zimmermann on lecture tour in Europe

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As part of his sabbatical semester last Fall, Professor Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) has given a series of talks through Europe, talking about various aspects of his research. At the Swiss National Bank, Universität St. Gallen, Banque de France and Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), he talked about the impact of bank capital regulation on credit. At the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva and Université de Toulouse, he talked about the interaction of malaria with the economy. At Universität Konstanz, he discussed his work with RePEc. He also gave five lectures on macroeconomic theory with heterogeneous agents at the Paris School of Economics.

In addition to his travels in Europe, Prof. Zimmermann spent several weeks at the University of California Santa Barbara, giving three lectures on the topics above and gave another talk at York University of his work on the economics of malaria.

Studying in the MA program: the economics of a new perspective

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Lawrence Posner with Professors Ray and Heffley
From CLAS Notes:

Retirement in the traditional sense held little interest for Lawrence E. Posner, MD, ’05 MA, Economics.

In 2003 he retired from Bayer Pharmaceutical Corp., West Haven, Conn., where he was senior vice president for research and development and worldwide head of regulatory affairs, overseeing some 800 employees.

He then accepted an offer to become head of U.S. R & D for Yamanouchi Pharma Ltd. of Tokyo, but left when that company merged with another and moved to Chicago.

That freed him to do what most people with an MD and a successful career behind them might not: Go back to school.

It had been on his mind for a while. He felt comfortable in the world of ideas and research – he began his career with specialty training in medical oncology, then spent three years at the National Cancer Institute, studying RNA tumor viruses and working in the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology under Dr. Robert Gallo, a pioneer in HIV research.

This time, he wanted to study economics – not business, he notes, but academic economics.

“Economists like to focus on utility – why people make decisions,” he says. “Economics give you that kind of perspective, on why people make certain choices.”

Returning to school at age 56 proved to be daunting. Most schools would not accept him as a degree student, and some did not even respond to his inquiries.

Metin M. Cosgel, professor of economics in CLAS at UConn, suggested that he enroll for a master’s degree rather than a PhD, to see how he liked it.

So Posner took an apartment on campus in Storrs, commuting home to Greenwich on weekends, and started his first semester with four courses.

“The teaching at UConn was great. The faculty was so well prepared and had such a command of the material,” he says.

And it was tough. In Prof. Kathleen Segerson’s micro-economics course, where he was the oldest student in the class and couldn’t read the blackboard because of a cataract, he earned a C.

He had been a good math student as an undergraduate at Brandeis University, but that was in the days when calculating meant whipping out a slide rule. As a grad student at UConn, he had to learn simple computer programming and revisit statistics, matrix algebra, and calculus.

Other grad students – some the same age as his son – helped him.

“I’m very grateful for my study group,” he says.

“Medical school was easy compared to going back,” adds Posner, who earned his MD with honors at Case Western Reserve University.

But Posner stuck with it, brought up his grade average, and earned his degree. He is now writing a paper with his thesis adviser, Prof. Dennis Heffley, on the effects of health care spending on life expectancy.

Health care policy, a hot button issue on the state and national political scenes, is one of his interests.

“The solution is not that hard,” he maintains. “There are ways out there to spend less with similar outcomes.”

After earning his master’s, he accepted a two-year contract assignment with Bayer, his former employer, before it merged with Schering AG.

Now he serves on corporate pharmaceutical boards – Labopharm, Inc., and Noxxon Pharma AG – and he is a general partner at Vedanta Capital in New York City, where he specializes in health care investments.

His wife, Amy Newburger, has a dermatology practice. Their daughter recently entered medical school at Columbia University Medical Center at 26, after majoring in theater arts in college, and their son is in graduate school in mathematics at New York University.

“To this day, they want to know why I didn’t walk at graduation,” he says.

But he is proud of his hard-earned degree. As he told Heffley, when Beethoven was asked which of his works he was proudest of, he referred to his only opera, Fidelio, because it was the most difficult and therefore the most dear.

Shortly after earning his master’s, Posner was approached by a biotechnology company in California that was looking for a CEO, but he would have had to relocate from Connecticut for up to three years.

His question to himself was, “Is it really going to make my life that much better?” he says.

“You start making economic decisions,” he adds.

Strength leads to losses for state jobs

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From CLAS News:

Connecticut’s high concentration in financial services employment now means it will face a sharp downtown in jobs and earnings, says the new issue of The Connecticut Economy , published by the Economics Department.

“Connecticut will probably be one of the hardest hit states in the country in terms of jobs lost and employment,” says Steven P. Lanza, executive editor of the quarterly magazine.

At a press conference unveiling the winter issue of the magazine, Lanza told economists and reporters that the financial services jobs, concentrated in the Bridgeport-Stamford and Hartford regions, with strengths also in the New Haven area, were “great news” when the economy was expanding.

Employment in insurance, securities, banking, and hedge fund businesses offered some of the highest paying jobs, benefiting the state in good times.

But the financial services industry it not only concentrated in Connecticut; it has a particularly high “job multiplier” effect. Financial services here measures 7.1 on the Location Quotient scale (anything above 1.0 shows more specialization in an industry than in the U.S. as a whole), and it spins off a large number of jobs and higher incomes for others in the region, too.

In good times, LQs greater than 1.0 “serve as engines of economic growth,” The Connecticut Economy reports.

When the engine sputters, however, the growth it stimulated grinds to a halt, too.

Job declines in the state are projected at nearly 4 percent, and earnings declines at nearly 3 percent, Lanza wrote, leading to tax revenue reductions, too.

More than 40,000 jobs in the state could be at risk, according to the magazine’s quarterly forecast. That number could double, under certain scenarios.

The magazine is forecasting unemployment topping 7 percent in the Bridgeport-Stamford region, 8 percent by this time next year in the Hartford region, and 7 percent in Norwich-New London in 2009.

If the slump extends through the next fiscal year, the magazine reported, the state’s budget gap could exceed $2 billion. Some estimates run three times that over the next two budget years, Lanza said.

The recovery may not come until after 2010, wrote Daniel W. Kennedy, senior economist with the Connecticut Department of Labor, Office of Research, who manages the magazine’s economic forecast.

“With the stakes do high, no state should be rooting more loudly for the success of the financial industry rescue package than Connecticut, or praying more earnestly for a merciful end to the current business cycle,” Lanza wrote in the issue’s lead article.

For more on the latest issue, go to http://cteconomy.uconn.edu/

To hear a podcast of Steven Lanza talking about the latest issue, click here.

Winter graduation ceremony set for Dec. 14 at Gampel

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Denis M. McCarthy, retired chairman, CEO, and president of Fidelity Management Trust Co., a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, will deliver the keynote address during Commencement on Dec. 14.

More than 800 students are expected to graduate during the University’s sixth annual mid-term Commencement Exercises, which begin at 2 p.m. in Gampel Pavilion.

McCarthy, who earned a bachelor’s degree in finance at UConn in 1964, and a master’s degree in economics in 1965, is co-chair of UConn’s current capital campaign and a member of the UConn Foundation Board of Directors. He chaired the board from 2000 to 2004.

He will receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree during the December ceremony.

“I’m forever grateful for what a UConn education has meant in my life,” says McCarthy. “In my younger days, UConn was there for me and gave me a great start on life.”

Read more in the UConn Advance.

Department Fares Well in Recent Study

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The Department fared well in a recent study on the research output of 129 U.S. economics departments that offer PhD degrees [“A Guide to Graduate Study in Economics: Ranking Economics Departments by Fields of Expertise,” Therese C. Grijalva and Clifford Nowell, Southern Economic Journal, 74 (2008), 971-996]. In three of the 17 fields studied, UConn ranked within the top 20 programs:

4th in Law and Economics (after Berkeley, Harvard, and Vanderbilt);

12th in Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics (after U.Illinois-Chicago, Harvard, Syracuse, MIT, BC, Berkeley, FSU, Georgia State, Wayne State, Princeton, and UCSD); and

15th in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics (after Iowa State, NC State, Wyoming, Harvard, Yale, UCSB, MIT, URI, Georgetown, SUNY Binghamton, Stanford, Colorado, Utah State, and RPI).

To read the entire article, click here.

Senior wins prestigious Marshall scholarship

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From CLAS in the news:

Michelle Prairie, a Presidential Scholar from Vernon, Conn., with a perfect 4.0 grade average, will spend the next two years in the United Kingdom studying for two master’s degrees in development economics.

She is the only student at a public institution in New England selected as a Marshall Scholar for 2009. The other New England winners were four students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three from Harvard, two from Boston College, and one each from Princeton and Middlebury.

Prairie will study for one year each either at the University of Nottingham and the London School of Economics and Political Science, or at the University of Warwick and the School of Advanced Study of the University of London.

She plans to become a professor of development economics, focusing her research on income inequality, particularly in Latin America, and on the effects of trade, aid, and government policies on the distribution of wealth. Eventually she hopes to be a policy analyst for the United Nations, the World Bank, or the U.S. government.

Prairie, who was valedictorian of her senior class at Rockville High School, entered UConn hoping to study international business. In her second semester she took an economics course and “something just clicked,” she recalls. She became an economics major in CLAS, where she has interned for the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis and for Associate Professor Susan Randolph (IDEAS), whose research focuses on development economics.

President Michael J. Hogan, whose letter of endorsement capped Prairie’s application to the Marshall committee, called her “thoughtful, astute, and very articulate.”

“Few students get as excited about economic theory and analysis as Michelle,” he wrote.

Prairie’s interest in development economics was born on a trip to Brazil with her church group when she was in high school.

She played soccer with 16-yearold Brazilians who had no shoes, she recalls. Riding on a bus from the airport through the outskirts of Sao Paulo, she was shocked by the stacked-up shanties on the mountainsides.

At UConn she found opportunities for study abroad in Sweden, where she observed the welfare state, and, through the campus Christian group, Reformed University Fellowship, in Peru, where she taught English as a volunteer and assisted a fledgling microfinance program.

“This is when I knew for certain that I wanted to become a development economist,” she wrote in her Marshall application. “I had found a way to serve the poor by using my passion for economic theory.”

She was reluctant at first to apply for a Marshall, questioning her chances among so many qualified applicants.

“In my mind, she had what it takes. She was a winner. She just needed to feel it,” says Jill R. Deans, director of the office of National Scholarships at UConn.

Deans arranged several mock interviews to prepare Michelle. Among the interviewers were history professor Christopher Clark, chair of the campus Marshall Scholarship nominating committee, and Sandra E. Shumway, adjunct professor in residence of Marine Sciences, who was herself a Marshall Scholar.

Prairie interns at the Travelers Insurance Company in the market research division. As a senior, she won the Travelers Insurance Company Scholarship, the top undergraduate award in the Economics Department.

Her mother, Ellen Prairie, works in the One-Card Office at Wilbur Cross, and her father, Robert Prairie, is a 1981 UConn alumnus in mechanical engineering technology.

“My whole four years at UConn, I could never have foreseen half of the things I’m doing now. I’m so appreciative to UConn for giving me these opportunities,” says Michelle.

She is UConn’s second student to win a prestigious Marshall scholarship, named for America’s first five-star Army general, George C. Marshall. In 1947, as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, he proposed American economic assistance to post-war Europe.
UConn’s first Marshall Scholar, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, CLAS ’76, is now a professor of history at the University of Colorado. As an undergraduate at UConn she was advised by Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Richard Brown.

UConn Board of Trustees names Segerson to chair

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From CLAS in the news;

Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), a professor of economics in CLAS, has been named by the Board of Trustees to fill the Philip E. Austin Chair for a three-year term.

The chair was established with contributions made in honor of Austin, who stepped down last year after 11 years as president of the University.

Segerson, who specializes in environmental and natural resources economics, law, and applied microeconomics, joined the University in 1986 and served as chair of the economics department from 2001 to 2005.

“Dr. Segerson is extremely qualified to serve in this position and brings to it an outstanding reputation as a researcher and teacher,” says Provost Peter J. Nicholls. “We are pleased to have someone in the chair who is regarded as a national expert in her field and who has dedicated her life not only to teaching and research but also to public service.”

A fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Association of Environmental and Resources Economists, Segerson was nominated for the position by former CLAS Dean Ross MacKinnon, who recently retired.

Segerson was awarded both the American Association of University Professors UConn Chapter Research Excellence Award and the UConn Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching last year.

“It is a great honor to be chosen to fill the Austin chair in its first three years,” says Segerson. “President Austin was very dedicated not only to the University of Connecticut as an institution, but also more generally to research and teaching related to public policy and the use of economics to understand and solve social problems. It is my hope that I’ll be able to contribute to his legacy through my work in environmental economics and the support made possible through this chair.”

Segerson serves on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and was recently a member of the U.S. General Accounting Office’s expert panel on climate change economics. She is the president-elect of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

Segerson holds a PhD from Cornell University and a BA from Dartmouth College. — Karen A. Grava, CLAS ’73

Grad students help Guatemalan NGOs attract potential donors via the Web

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Two master’s degree candidates in economics are on a mission to make the world a better place, starting in Guatemala, where a multitude of non-profit organizations are seeking donors and resources to help develop their country.

Justin Podbielski, CLAS ’07, and Maura Williams visited Guatemala last summer as volunteers. They were struck by inefficiencies in the development community, where individual non-profit organizations sometimes compete for the same resources or are unaware of the activities of other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

At first, they saw this as an academic problem — this is what happens in the non-profit community when there are no profit incentives to govern your actions.

Then they realized that the reputation of an NGO functioned as an incentive. The more information potential donors have about an organization, and the more transparent the NGO is, the more likely donors are to support it.

“If you improve the information flow, you can use access to information as a way to improve the flow of donations,” Podbielski theorized.

That’s when the problem moved them to action. They found a solution in a familiar tool: the social networking web site Facebook.

Read more in the UConn Advance.