PhD

MA, PhD alumna featured in UConn Alumni magazine

Posted on by

Excerpts from a feature in the latest UConn Magazine:

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.

Read more here.

Current PhD student and two recent graduates to publish in Economic Inquiry

Posted on by

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.