Alumni

UConn Ph.D. Serves as World Bank’s Lead Economist in Russia

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Zeljko Bogetic, one of Professor Dennis Heffley’s former Ph.D. students, currently is serving as Lead Economist and Country Sector Coordinator for Russia in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. A native of Montegro, Zeljko completed his dissertation (A Computable General Equilibrium Model of the Yugoslav Economy) in 1990. Soon thereafter, he entered the World Bank’s prestigious Young Professionals Program.

Zeljko has held a number of positions during his 20-year career at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Prior to his present assignment in Moscow, he served as a lead economist in the Africa Region of the World Bank, with primary responsibilities for Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and before that he served as lead economist for South Africa and the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) cluster leader for Southern Africa Customs Union countries at the World Bank. Zeljko’s command of five languages—Serbo-Croatian, English, French, Russian, and Spanish—has clearly been put to good use over the years.

In addition to his administrative duties, Zeljko has published books, scholarly articles, and papers on a variety of subjects: public finance reforms in transition economies; tax and expenditure policies; fiscal federalism; macroeconomic stabilization; dollarization and currency boards; infrastructure, productivity, and growth; and benchmarking of infrastructure performance. In addition to co-editing one the World Bank’s early volumes on transition economies (Financing Government in the Transition, 1995), he has published articles in the Journal of Comparative Economics, Challenge, the Cato Journal, World Development, Central Banking, Contemporary Economic Policy, South African Journal of Economics, Finance & Development, and Journal of Development Perspectives, as well as a number of papers in the World Bank’s Research Working Paper Series. Zeljko also leads a team of researchers that produce the World Bank’s Russian Economic Report, a prime source of information on recent macroeconomic conditions and policy developments in Russia.

Alumnus Profile: Donald Vandegrift

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Economics, like most disciplines, has become highly specialized, so it is not surprising that many economists focus their research on a narrow range of topics or issues. Not so for one of our Ph.D. alumni, Donald Vandegrift (IDEAS).

Don completed his doctorate in 1993 under the tutelage of Prof. Richard Langlois. Apparently Dick’s interest in a wide range of topics in the field of industrial organization rubbed off on Don, who currently serves as Chair of the Department of Economics in the School of Business at The College of New Jersey.

Over the years, Don has published papers on performance excuse under contracts (European Journal of Law and Economics, 1997), asset specificity (Eastern Economic Journal, 1998), energy use (Journal of Energy and Development, 1999), product warranty (Contemporary Economic Policy, 2001), risky strategies in “tournament competition” (Labour Economics, 2003), obesity rates (Health & Place, 2004), gender differences in competitive strategies (Journal of Socio-Economics, 2005), prescription drug spending (Southern Economic Journal, 2006), incentive effects in experimental settings (Experimental Economics, 2007), and hedge fund performance (Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds, 2009).

Don’s forthcoming work continues to reflect his exceptional versatility. A paper on hedge fund performance will soon appear in the Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds; his experimental analysis of differences in competitive behavior between men and women is slated for publication by the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; a study of sabotage in tournaments has been accepted by the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics; and the Annals of Regional Science will publish a paper on linkages between open space, house prices, and the local property tax base.

It is great to see our former students enjoying their work and sharing it with others. Don spoke at our on-campus 2008 Economics Reunion and Forum, and we are hoping that he will be back in Storrs next spring, when we repeat this successful event. Don and other former grad students presented research papers, participated in job-experience panels, met our current students and newer faculty, and reconnected with old friends and fellow alums. We will be posting plans for the next event, but it is clear that even in his current administrative role as Department Chair, Don has continued his lively line(s) of research and will have little problem coming up with a new paper for the 2010 reunion.

Former MA and PhD Students: Hold These Dates

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In late March 2008, the Department hosted a Graduate Reunion and Forum at the Bishop Center. At the one-day reunion, some of our former PhD students presented their recent research, while others employed in the private sector or by government described their work in professional experience panels. That evening, we also held the Department’s annual awards banquet. We are planning to host a similar event on Friday, April 2, 2010.

Also, the day before the reunion (April 1), we will be holding the “Philip E. Austin Forum on Economics and Public Policy.” Professor Segerson is organizing this event, and funding it using part of the endowment funds for the Austin Chair. The speaker for the forum will be Harvard University environmental economist Robert Stavins. He will speak on climate change in a Post-Kyoto era. President Emeritus Austin, Provost Nicholls, and Dean Teitelbaum are all planning to attend this event.

We will have more details about both events, but for now we hope you will keep the two dates open and plan to attend. See you in April!

MA alumnus applies his training in the insurance industry

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After leaving UConn with his MA in 2005, Steve Sugrue worked for Circuit City in Richmond, VA designing large-scale inventory demand forecasting systems and later moved to online/digital marketing. Since the company folded, he has been working for State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL as a Research Statistician, a PhD-level position. He does a lot of time series modeling related to banking deposit instruments and also some panel data modeling related to Internet consumers. He just started some work related to game-theoretic approaches to optimal financial product mixes over the customer life cycle.

The job is a mixture of economics and statistics. Steve does literature reviews to see how certain problems or classes of problems have been approached academically and he tries to adapt that to local needs. His group is more unconventional, in that it is bit of a think-tank in that it is called out to consult on the more esoteric issues that are not as clear-cut with respect to methodology choice and analytic flow. He states that his group’s job is to bring their bubble gum and duct tape expert opinions and experience and solve the problems. In this respect, the flexibility of the training of an economist, along with a few statistics classes have helped him a lot.

Latest issue of Indian Economic Review features three articles with UConn connections

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In a rare coincidence, all three lead articles on the Indian Economic Review, a top journal in India, have a UConn connection. The first is authored by Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) a 2005 PhD alumnus very recently promoted to full professor at the University of Pretoria: Financial Liberalization and a Possible Growth-Inflation Trade-Off. The second is authored by Basab Dasgupta, a 2005 PhD alumnus: Endogenous Growth in the Presence of Informal Credit Markets in India: A Comparative Analysis Between Credit Rationing and Self-Revelation Regimes. And the third is authored by Prof. Ray, currently faculty at UConn: Are Indian Firms too Small? A Nonparametric Analysis of Cost Efficiency and the Optimal Organization of the Indian Manufacturing Industry.

Both Gupta and Dasgupta were advised by Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS). The first article is also available as a University of Pretoria working paper, and the latter two articles as UConn working papers: 1, 2, 3.

PhD placement outcomes for 2008/09

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This year (July 1, 2008-2009), 8 of the Department’s Ph.D. students defended their dissertations. Despite the grim economy and rather thin academic job market, each of the students has secured a position. The placements include 6 full-time tenure-track positions, and 2 visiting faculty appointments. The average time to completion for this group was below the 5 years that has become a target in most PhD programs.


  • Rasha Ahmed (defended 7/2/08), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.
  • James Boudreau (defended 5/1/09), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics & Finance, University of Texas, Pan American, Edinburg, TX. (blog post)
  • Biplab Ghosh (defended 5/6/09), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics & Management, Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN. (blog post)
  • Nicholas Jolly (defended 11/12/08), Economist, Office of Research, Connecticut Department of Labor, Wethersfield, CT; Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI.
  • Philip Shaw (defended 8/4/08), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT. (blog post)
  • Natalya Shelkova (defended 5/21/09), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Guilford College, Greensboro, NC. (blog post)
  • Nicholas Shunda (defended 8/1/08), Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Redlands, Redlands, CA. (blog post)
  • Brian Volz (defended 4/28/09), Assistant Professor in Residence, Department of Economics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. blog post)

Another recent Ph.D. student, Tsvetanka Karagyozova (defended 10/8/07), is also moving from a two-year post-doc position at the University of British Columbia to a full-time tenure-track position at Lawrence University, Appleton, WI. (blog post)

And a final bit of good news comes from Rimvydas Baltaduonis (defended Spring 2007). After serving as a post-doctoral fellow under the tutelage of 2002 Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, first at George Mason University and then at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute, Rim has accepted a position at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. (blog post)

The Department is proud of the progress the graduate program has made, and we offer each of these students, like their predecessors, our very best wishes for a long, fruitful and satisfying career.

Economics alum combines academic research and public service

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After completing his Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of Prof. Francis Ahking (IDEAS), Kenneth Daniels (IDEAS) joined the Department of Finance at Virginia Commonwealth University. A specialist in financial services and community development, Ken has published his research in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, The Journal of Corporate Finance, The Financial Review, and a rich variety of other professional journals. His most recent contribution is a co-authored paper titled “An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants and Pricing of Corporate Bond Clawbacks” in the Journal of Corporate Finance. For his earlier work on derivatives, he received the Sydney Futures Exchange Prize; the Eastern Finance Association offered similar recognition for a paper on investments.

Throughout his career, Ken has combined his academic research with various forms of public service. He serves as a Board Member of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Treasury Board, a group that oversees the state’s public banking deposits and debt and manages several state investment portfolios. He also is a Board Member of the Virginia Community Development Corporation and the Virginia Community Capital Corporation, the only non-profit bank holding corporation in the U.S.

PhD alumnus listed among top 100 young economists

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Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) is a 2005 graduate, advised by Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS) whose career is off to a flying start. A tenured professor at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and a very prolific author, he is now listed among the 100 top young economists on RePEc. As of this writing, he is listed at rank 97 for those with 10 years or less in their career. With four more years of eligibility, his ranking is sure to improve even more.

Recent graduate Tsvetanka Karagoyozova heading to Lawrence University

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This fall our alumnus, Tsvetanka Karagyozova, will join Lawrence University in Appleton, WI as an Assistant Professor of Economics. A liberal-arts institution charted in 1847, Lawrence was among the first colleges in the United States to be founded coeducational.

Tsvety defended her thesis in 2007 under the guidance of Prof. Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) and spent the last two years as a post-doctoral teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia. Tsvety’s research interests are in the field of financial economics, and more specifically in asset pricing and the economics of insurance. She is interested in how financial markets operate in the presence of informational asymmetries and in new models of individual decision-making in economics.

Two MA, PhD alumni publish new edition of popular textbook

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A new edition of a popular health economics textbook, “Health Economics: Theory, Insights, and Industry Studies,” written by two of the Department’s former Ph.D. Students, Rexford Santerre (PhD, 1983) and Stephen Neun (PhD, 1988), will be published this June by South-Western/Cengage Learning.

Formerly a Professor of Economics at Bentley College, Rex Santerre (IDEAS) is now a Professor of Finance and Healthcare Management in the UConn School of Business. He has published extensively in the fields of health economics, local public finance, and industrial organization.

Steve Neun is currently the Academic Dean at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts. Prior to that he served as Professor Economics, Assistant VP for Academic Affairs, and Dean of the School of Graduate and Extended Studies at Utica College in upstate New York.