PhD

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.

Recent PhD Rimvydas Baltaduonis heading to Gettysburg College

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Recent graduate Rimvydas Baltaduonis (IDEAS), advised by Vicki Knoblauch (IDEAS), is finishing up his post-doc fellowship at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University where he worked with a world renowned team of experimental economists including a 2002 Nobel laureate in economics Vernon L. Smith (IDEAS). In August, Rim will begin a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. During last two years as a post-doc fellow at George Mason University and then at Chapman University, Rim continued his research of electric power markets and helped organizing numerous workshops in experimental economics for graduate, undergraduate and high school students, public utility regulators, businessmen, faculty and high school teachers. He conducted workshops in Virginia, California, Colorado, Guatemala and recently in Lithuania. These workshops in experimental economics are designed to promote research, teaching and learning of economics through laboratory experiments. Before Rim assumes his position at Gettysburg this fall, he will spend summer (actually winter!) months as a Visiting Fellow in Experimental Economics at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Natalya Shelkova defends thesis, heads to Guilford College

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Natalya Shelkova (IDEAS) defended her thesis on Thursday, May 21 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS). In her research she studies the possibility of collusion by low-wage employers at the non-binding minimum wage. She tests this hypothesis empirically in the chapter titled “Low-wage labor markets and the power of suggestion”, a version of which is a part of both our department’s working paper series as well as Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section working papers series. She also constructed a search-theoretic model that allows for partial collusion at the minimum wage, resulting in replication of both the minimum wage spike and wage dispersion.

In August Natalya starts her new job as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. Guilford College, established in 1837 as one of the country colleges founded by Quakers, is strongly committed to the ideals of peace, social justice and equality. The Quakers of Greensboro cared for the wounded soldiers on both sides during the American Revolutionary War, and harbored runaway slaves seeking to escape to the North during the antebellum era. Natalya is very excited about her new job and about the opportunity to work and contribute to such a historic place.

Article by PhD alumnus Rangan Gupta among the hottest in Journal of Economics and Business

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Elsevier recently announced that an article by Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) in the Journal of Economics and Business was among the most downloaded on its site. Tax evasion and financial repression was one of the chapters of his UConn PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS).

Using an overlapping generation model, Gupta studies how tax evasion interacts with financial repression, as expressed by a high reserve deposit ratio requirement in banks. Applied to southern European countries, he finds that a higher degree of tax evasion, resulting from lower penalty rates and higher corruption, produces in a social optimum higher degrees of financial repression. However, higher degrees of tax evasion, due to lower tax rates, tend to reduce the optimal degree of financial repression. Thus, there are asymmetries in the relationship between reserve requirements and tax evasion. More importantly, tax evasion and financial repression are positively correlated if and only if the change in the former results from an alteration in the penalty rate or the level of corruption.

Report examines impact of mass layoffs on workers’ long-term earnings

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From the UConn Advance:

For workers losing jobs due to mass layoffs in the current economic downturn, the bad news is that more people than ever are looking for work right now, making it the toughest job market in at least two decades.

But for those lucky enough to find another job, there is more bad news: they will likely suffer lower wages for many years compared to similar workers who are not laid off.

A new study (pdf) from UConn and the Connecticut Department of Labor shows how the business cycle plays a determining role in the extent of wage losses for workers let go in mass layoffs and plant closings.

The study finds that for workers losing jobs during a recession, the damage to their earnings can linger for years. By contrast, for workers who lose jobs as part of a mass layoff or plant closure in more favorable times, long-term earnings losses are negligible.

Kenneth Couch (IDEAS), an associate professor of economics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, teamed up with researchers at the Connecticut Department of Labor, economist Nicholas Jolly (MA, PhD) and analyst Dana Placzek, for the study.

Read more in the UConn Advance

Recent PhD to publish in Games and Economic Behavior

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Recent graduate Nicholas Shunda (IDEAS), advised by Vicki Knoblauch (IDEAS), will publish the paper “Auctions with a Buy Price: The Case of Reference-Dependent Preferences” in the journal Games and Economic Behavior. The paper contributes to a theoretical literature on rationales for the hybrid selling mechanism known as an auction with a buy price. In an auction with a buy price, a seller provides bidders with an option to forgo the auction and transact at a fixed price. The most well-known example of an auction with a buy price is eBay’s “Buy-It-Now” feature. The paper demonstrates that sellers can enhance revenues by adding a buy price to their auctions if bidders evaluate auction and purchase outcomes on the bases of surplus and comparison to a reference point depending upon the auction’s reserve and buy price. In contrast to alternative explanations for auctions with buy prices, such as risk aversion and impatience, which predict bidding behavior that is independent of the auction’s parameters, bidders with reference-dependent preferences submit bids that vary directly with the existence and size of the auction’s reserve and buy prices, behavior extensively documented in laboratory and field experimental auctions.