Author: McConnel, Mark

Professor Miceli’s The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

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Stanford University Press has just published the third edition of Thomas J. Miceli’s Law and Economics textbook.

From the publisher:

“Master teacher Thomas J. Miceli provides an introduction to law and economics that reveals how economic principles can explain the structure of the law and make it more efficient.

The third edition of this seminal textbook is thoroughly updated to include recent cases and the latest scholarship, with particular attention paid to torts, contracts, property rights, and the economics of crime. A new chapter organization, ideal for quarter- or semester-long courses, strengthens the book’s focus on unifying themes in the field.

As Miceli tells a cohesive, analytical “story” about law from a distinctly economic perspective, exercises and problems encourage students to deepen their knowledge.”

The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

New Frontiers in Development Economics Conference

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The New Frontiers in Development Economics conference, hosted by the Department of Economics, will be bringing together some of the most prominent researchers in Development Economics on October 6th and 7th.

Visit the website at http://newfrontiers.econ.uconn.edu for complete information about the program, speakers, location, and other details.

Philip E. Austin Chair Lecture on Economics and Public Policy

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Richard Murnane, the Thompson Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will present the Fall 2017 Philip E. Austin Chair Lecture on Economics & Public Policy:

Income Inequality & Private School Enrollment

The lecture, co-sponsored by the Philip E. Austin Chair, Center for Economic Policy and Analysis, and the Department of Economics, will be held:

Thursday, September 28th
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Dodd Center Konover Auditorium

A reception will follow the lecture.

Professor Zhao’s Article in VoxChina

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Kai ZhaoAn article by Professor Zhao and his coauthor Ayse Imrohoroglu (USC Marshall) has been posted on VoxChina.org, an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit platform recently initiated by Princeton together with a group of scholars from other institutions including UPenn and CUHK (Shenzhen).

In this article, they discuss their research on the determinants of the Chinese saving rates. They focus on the paper “The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics”, in which they find that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy is an important cause of the increase in China’s saving rate since 1980. This paper is the first major paper growing out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world.

Professor Zhao’s article can be found at: http://www.voxchina.org/show-3-43.html

Professor Jungbin Hwang to be Published in Econometric Theory

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Professor Jungbin Hwang and his co-author Yixiao Sun have had their paper, “Simple, Robust, and Accurate F and t Tests in Cointegrated Systems,” accepted by Econometric Theory  as a lead article in a future issue.

In this paper, they propose new, simple, and more accurate statistical tests in a cointegrated system that allows for endogenous regressors and serially dependent errors. The approach involves first transforming the time series using orthonormal basis functions in L-2 space, which have energy concentrated at low frequencies, and then running an augmented regression based on the transformed data and constructing the test statistics in the usual way. The F and t tests developed in this article, are extremely simple to implement have more accurate size in finite samples than existing tests such as the asymptotic chi-squared and normal tests based on the fully modified OLS estimator of Phillips and Hansen (1990) and can be made as powerful as the latter test.

Professor Hwang Publishes in Journal of Econometrics

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Professor Jungbin Hwang has published the paper “Asymptotic F and t tests in an efficient GMM setting” with his co-author Yixiao Sun in the Journal of Econometrics Volume 198, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 277-295.

In this paper, they propose a simple and easy-to-implement modification to the trinity of test statistics in the two-step efficient GMM setting and show that the modified test statistics are all asymptotically F distributed under the so-called fixed-smoothing asymptotics. The main contributions of this paper are developing convenient asymptotic F tests whose critical values, i.e., the standard F critical values, are readily available from standard statistical tables and programming environments. For testing a single restriction with a one-sided alternative, the paper also develops an asymptotic test theory using the standard t distribution as the reference distribution.

Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

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The American Economic Association has posted an interview with Karthik Muralidharan on “Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India“, the paper that he and Professor Nishith Prakash have published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

The interview is online at

Biking to a better future

An interview with Karthik Muralidharan about closing the education gender gap in India

Professor Prakash is following up on this work with his new project, ‘Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia’.  For more information, see Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

Graduate Students Presenting Their Work at Conferences

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Graduate students working on immigration issues with Professor Delia Furtado have been traveling quite a bit in the past few months.  Samantha Minieri was in Chicago presenting her paper, “Norms and Parental Leave: Do Home Country Policies Affect Immigrants,” at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA).

Tao Song has presented his job market paper, “Honey, Robots Shrunk My Wage! Native-Immigrant Wage Gaps and Skill Biased Technological Change,” at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)’s Workshop on Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market in Mannheim, Germany; the Society of Labor Economists’ annual meeting in Raleigh, NC; and the Western Economics Association International (WEAI) Annual meeting in San Diego, CA.

Also at the Western meetings, Tian Lou presented her paper, “Ethnic Segregation, Education, and Immigrants’ Labor Market Outcomes,​” and Haiyang Kong presented his paper, “What is the Impact of Industrial Structure on Immigrants’ English Language Fluency?”

Professor Couch Makes Research Presentations at Pew, NYU, UMass, and Michigan

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Professor Kenneth Couch has made research presentations during the 2017 Spring semester at the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, the Wagner School at New York University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Michigan Retirement Research Consortium at the University of Michigan.

In each seminar Professor Couch discussed his research on the implications of rising longevity on Social Security programs.  The research considers widely discussed reforms to the system to adjust benefit receipt in response to changing longevity and the distributional impacts of potential changes.

Professors Prakash and Fiala receive 2017-2018 Research Excellence Funding

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Professor Nishith Prakash and Professor Nathan Fiala have received 2017-2018 Research Excellence Program funding for their proposal:

Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

This funding will supplement Professor Prakash’s project studying the impact of bicycles on female education and empowerment in Zambia.

Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia