Working papers are, at least in Economics, the best way to let others know about your research. These pre-publications have been shown to be more read and to lead to more citations than works that only appear as articles, and this despite the lack of peer-review in most working paper series. The UConn Economics Department is now giving its alumni the opportunity to pre-publish their recent works in the “UConn Economics Alumni Working Paper” series. These working papers get a special cover and are indexed in RePEc and thus disseminated through the various RePEc services and then further picked up by other services like Google Scholar.
For interested alumni, the procedure is the following. Send to your adviser or to Christian Zimmermann a single PDF file of your paper. The message should contain title, abstract, JEL codes and keywords. The actual text (the introduction) should start on a fresh page. All tables, figures and appendices, if any, should be contained within the same PDF file. If approved, your adviser will then forward your message to the working paper coordinator who will post your paper.
In the more than a dozen years since she returned to Taiwan from Storrs, Lih-Chyi Wen ’93 M.A., ’96 Ph.D. has established a career as an environmental economist who continues to break new ground in one of the world’s emerging regions.
Wen, deputy director and research fellow in the International Division of the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the Taiwan World Trade Organization, is playing a crucial role in proposing new economic and environmental policies to aid her country.
Lih-Chyi has combined her economics training and her passion for environmental issues and used them to understand and improve environmental management in her home country of Taiwan, which faces numerous environmental challenges as its economy grows,” says Kathleen Segerson, Philip E. Austin Professor of Economics, who served as Wen’s advisor at UConn.
The respect is mutual. Wen says the key to her success at Storrs was the support she received from the faculty, particularly Segerson.
“She not only has a brilliant, analytical mind and great originality, which is evidenced throughout her teaching and research work, but she also takes care of graduate students as if they were her own kids,” Wen says.
The author of two books and dozens of commissioned articles on environmental policy as well as economic policy, Wen was named one of 2008’s Rising Stars in Taipei by the Central News Agency, selected by a 10-member panel of university presidents.
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.
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.
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.
Lawrence Posner with Professors Ray and HeffleyFrom 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.
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.”