Five Sewanee: University of the South professors were asked to share their thoughts on teaching in the Information Age, and our own Tao Song, PhD ’17, was one of them. See his reflections on how the explorer mentality guides his teaching.
In addition to his devotion to teaching at Sewanee, Tao remains committed to research. Together with Professor Delia Furtado, he recently published a chapter on interethnic marriages in the Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics.
Matthew Ross, 2016 UConn Ph.D. in Economics, has been hired by the School Public Policy & Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University as an Associate Professor, leaving his previous Assistant Professor position at Claremont Graduate School.
Matt works on research related to technological change in the labor market, racial profiling in policing and the process of scientific research. His work has been or will soon be published in several major journals including Nature, Journal of Human Resources, Industrial Labor Relations Review, and Criminology and Public Policy. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the US Department of Transportation.
Third-year PhD student Anastassiya Karaban has received funding in support of her research. Her project, done in collaboration with Professor Jorge Agüero, is entitled “Female Education, Empowerment and Bargaining over Babies in Sub-Saharan Africa”.
The funding is through the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color through Africana Studies at UConn:
“In November 2015, the White House Council on Women and Girls announced a new initiative on women and girls of color – the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color—during a summit co-hosted by the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University. The Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color, which the University of Connecticut joined in 2015, consists of more than fifty colleges, universities and non-profit organizations committed to studying and addressing the educational, health and social services disparities faced by women and girls of color. Housed within the Africana Studies Institute, UConn’s Collaborative aligns with Africana’s goals to prioritize research and collaboration that target health disparities and injustice and the health and well-being of populations both racialized and gendered.”
https://africana.uconn.edu/collaborative-call-for-proposals-2022/
Huanan Xu, Ph.D. ’16, was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of Economics at Indiana University South Bend’s Judd Leighton School of Business and Economics. Her main research interests are in the areas of labor and demographic economics, immigration, and the economics of education, but she has several recent papers examining the labor market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since defending her dissertation and leaving UConn, she has maintained close connections to our department, coauthoring with Professor Ken Couch (Journal of Public Economics 2020 and Economic Inquiry 2022), Professor Delia Furtado (Labour Economics 2019), and Tao Song, Ph.D. ‘17 (Southern Economic Journal 2020).
Congratulations, Huanan!
Leshui He has received tenure at Bates College.
Leshui completed his thesis at UConn in 2013 under the supervision of Professors Richard Langlois, Robert Gibbons, Christian Zimmermann, and Vicki Knoblauch.
He started his position as an Assistant Professor at Bates College in 2015, and works primarily in the fields of organizational economics and industrial organization. He is also working on research projects on education with Professor Stephen L. Ross.
While the department is not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty! This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Jasmine Kuyateh-Banks
Melissa Mendez
Kelly-Anne Moffa
Joslin Valiyaveettil
Clare Wieduwilt
Linge Yang
Michael Zhu
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Lauren Pawlowski
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Ryan Durrell
Cole Ensinger
Yue Sun
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Kader Akpinar
Susan Bailey
Prasad Gosavi
SeSe Nguyen
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Brendan Adams
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Linge Yang
Charles Triano Scholarship
Matthew Petridis
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Kelly-Anne Moffa
Benjamin Scudder
Kira Smith
Alexander Taylor
Joslin Valiyaveettil
Clare Wieduwilt
Michael Zhu
Robert J. Monte Scholarship
Isadore Johnson
Ross Mayer Scholarship
John Peterson
Ajshe Zulfi
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Jinsoon Cho
Jingwei Huang
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Miranda Mendiola Valdez
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Yijia Gao
Anastassiya Karaban
Ha Kyeong Lee
Kunze Li
Ghania Shuaib
Jiaqi Wang
Yangkeun Yun
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Umesh Ghimire
Economics Department General Scholarship
Tiange Du
Xuejian Gong
Ruohan Huang
Benjamin Taraskevich
Ziyun Wu
Yizhi Zhu
Best Third Year Paper Award
Lindsey Buck, awarded for her paper “Head Start Improves Health and Welfare 25 Years After Participation”
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Faisal Algosair
Abdulmohsen Almuhaisen
Erdal Asker
Birenda Budha
Dingxian Cao
Jingyun Chen
Zhenhao Gong
Treena Goswami
Huarui Jing
Chuang Li
Chun Li
Xizi Li
Tongan Liu
Deepak Saraswat
Rui Sun
Victor Volkman
Jinning Wang
Haoxiang Xu
Heli Xu
Heshan Zhang
Wei Zheng
Faculty Awards
Grillo Family Research Award
Grillo Family Teaching Award
Congratulations to everyone!
Aaron Cooke, a 2018 PhD graduate of the UConn Department of Economics, recently became the Chief Economist for Macroeconomic Policy at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
The CEA, an agency within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy.
Aaron earned his PhD degree from the Department of Economics in 2018, specializing in macroeconomics and public policy. His PhD dissertation, “Three Essays on Wealth and Income Inequality”, studied the causes of U.S. wealth and income inequality, and was completed under the supervision of Professor Kai Zhao.
Prior to joining the CEA, Aaron was an economist at the Office of Management and Budget.
PhD candidate Wei Zheng’s job market paper “Child Tax Credit and Maternal Labor Supply” has been featured in a post by the Niskanen Center:
New research finds the Child Tax Credit promotes work
From the post:
“The work incentive created by the Earned Income Tax Credit has been the subject of extensive study for decades now, with generally positive results. The pro-work potential of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), in contrast, has been relatively ignored.
A new job market paper from Wei Zheng, a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, attempts to fill this gap in the literature. Using event study and simulation techniques, Zheng provides new and detailed estimates of the effect of the Child Tax Credit on maternal labor supply. The headline finding: a $1000 increase in the average CTC is associated with a 1.1 percentage point increase in labor force participation for single mothers.”
More information about Wei Zheng and her research may be found online at https://weizhengecon.wixsite.com/website
Professor Jorge Agüero and third year PhD student Miranda Mendiola’s proposal “Role models: Information and Gender Stereotypes” for a pilot project, sponsored by the Innovation Laboratory for Cost-Effective Educational Policy – MineduLAB in the Peruvian Ministry of Education, has been approved.
Their project has the objective of reducing gender stereotypes and improving grades for high school students through the use of role models. Traditionally, efforts to reduce gender gaps have focused on empowering women. Professor Agüero and Miranda’s project focuses on changing the perception of both genders’ abilities by showing students movies that have young main characters being successful in careers that are nontraditional for their gender. They hope to improve women’s scores in STEM courses, where they traditionally perform worse, and also to improve men’s scores in courses they traditionally struggle with (Spanish and history). They will measure changes in gender bias through a questionnaire and a game, with the objective of measuring both explicit and implicit biases.
This project will hopefully be a pilot for a larger project in Peru, aiding in the reduction of gender bias in Peruvian schools.
UConn’s Nishith Prakash and Lindsey Buck, along with coauthors Maria Micaela Sviatschi and Sofia Amaral were awarded a $76,000 grant from Princeton in order to study COVID-19’s implications on domestic violence.
Project Title: Macroeconomic Shocks and Domestic Violence: Evidence from COVID-19
Abstract:
Domestic violence (DV), defined as stalking, rape, or physical violence, is a global problem with 35% of women worldwide reporting experiencing DV (WHO 2017). In this project, our goal is twofold. First, we aim to look at COVID-19 – a large macroeconomic and health shock — on an important outcome from a welfare perspective: domestic violence (DV). DV is an important outcome to study because it has large financial and health implications; DV survivors suffer reductions in earnings and poor health (Aizer, 2011) and the CDC spends $5.8bn annually on health costs related to DV (St. Jude House). Second, we also aim to test two interventions that are likely to determine pathways to aid victims of DV during a pandemic: one consists of providing labor market opportunities for women and a second one on providing information on how to identify and respond in DV cases. We will sample 4000 women in the U.S. on the M-Turk platform and collect information on their financial, emotional, and relationship stress levels. Then, we provide two interventions. The first treatment will provide information on the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH), where trained advocates are available to talk confidentially and provide resources on DV. We will also provide the NDVH’s resources on healthy relationships, legal help, and conflict resolution. The second treatment will provide a cash transfer to women for completing tasks on M-Turk; in this way we will increase women’s labor market opportunities at home. Our results will shed light on two important questions: First, can information mitigate the effects of DV? Secondly, can labor market opportunities mitigate the effects on DV? Our goal is to look at the broad implications of COVID-19 on DV and illustrate policy opportunities to mitigate DV in the wake of an unprecedented macroeconomic shock.
More information on the project can be found here: https://www.eeassoc.org/index.php?site=JEEA&page=298&trsz=299 and in a recent article in UConn Today:
How will COVID-19 Affect Domestic Violence?
Associate Professor of Economics Nishith Prakash and graduate student Lindsey Buck are part of a research group that was awarded a $76,000 grant from Princeton University to study COVID-19’s implications on domestic violence. They will test two interventions that are likely to determine pathways to aid victims of domestic violence during a pandemic: One consists of providing labor market opportunities for women, and a second one that provides information on how to identify and respond in domestic violence cases.