PhD profile

Spotlight on Alumni: Huskies in Sewanee

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Professor Furdate with PhD alumni Huarui Jing and Tao Song.
Professor Furtado with UConn PhD alumni Huarui Jing and Tao Song at Sewanee

This past spring, Prof. Delia Furtado gave the Georgescu-Rogen Lecture at Sewanee: The University of the South while visiting with UConn PhDs, Huarui Jing and Tao Song.

Sewanee is among the nation’s top national liberal arts colleges and is consistently ranked as one of the top five in the South. While Professor Furtado enjoyed walking around the beautiful campus, often spotting students and faculty in their academic gowns, her favorite part of the trip was catching up with former UConn students.

Sewanee: The University of the SouthHuari’s research interests are in asset pricing, financial econometrics, macro finance, and machine learning.  At Sewanee, she teaches the courses, Investment Finance, Derivatives and Fixed Income Securities, Financial Modeling, and Financial Engineering.

Tao’s research interests are in labor and urban economics with a particular focus on immigration. He has taught Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Econometrics as well as the field courses Labor Economics, Urban Economics, and the Economics of Immigration. This month, he was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor. Congratulations, Tao!

Interior of building at at Sewanee: The University of the SouthCurrent UConn PhD students, do reach out to Huari and Tao for advice on building a successful academic career at a liberal arts college.

Former UConn PhD students, we would love to know where you are and what you’re up to! Contact Lisa Bono at lisa.bono@uconn.edu.

PhD Students Studying Migration on the Move

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Treena Goswami presented her paper, “Immigrants and Labor Market Decisions of Older Natives“ at the Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting held in April this year in New Orleans. She will start a position at the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute in the Social and Decision Analytics Division.

In May, Abdulmohsen Almuhaisen presented his paper, “Immigration Enforcement and the Institutionalization of Elderly Americans ,” coauthored with Professor Delia Furtado and Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes from UC-Merced, at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) in Philadelphia. He will return to Saudi Arabia to work at the Saudi Central Bank in the late summer.

Both were hooded at this year’s Commencement Ceremonies by advisor, Professor Delia Furtado.

Congratulations and good luck, Treena and Abdulmohsen!

International PhD Students Start Careers in the US Financial Industry

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Ziyun Wu, Ruohan Huang, and Xuejian Gong

We are delighted to share that three of our 5th-year PhD students focusing in econometrics, Xuejian Gong, Ruohan Huang, and Ziyun Wu, recently accepted (full-time) job offers in the US financial industry.

Xuejian has accepted a job offer as assistant vice president for wholesale credit risk management at Citi Institutional Clients Group. His dissertation (advised by Professor Duke Kao) is about applying distributionally robust optimization in economic and financial models. Ruohan has started her career at OneMain General Services Corporation as a senior analyst in credit, pricing, and analytics. The subject of her dissertation (advised by Professor Jungbin Hwang) is financial econometrics, focusing on empirical asset pricing models. Lastly, Ziyun has started work as a data scientist at Hartford Steam Boiler – Munich Re. Her dissertation (advised by Professor Duke Kao) studies the machine learning approach in asset pricing.

All three students commented that their programming language skills and understanding of various econometrics/statistical theories from their PhD training were key factors for their success in the job market. Also, they pointed out the importance of earlier preparations for the industry job market, as most companies for quantitative analyst positions have at least two rounds of interviews for coding and critical thinking.

We are again pleased to congratulate our PhD students’ achievements in their job markets and know that they will have great success in their careers in financial industries!

Tao Song, PhD 2017, Featured on Sewanee’s Faculty Spotlight

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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.

Wei Zheng’s research on the Child Tax Credit featured by Niskanen Center

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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

Zheng Xu Defends Dissertation, Stays at Harvard

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ZhengDefenseOn August 28th, Zheng Xu defended his dissertation, “Developing in the Era of Globalization: The Case of China” written under the supervision of major advisor Professor Delia Furtado and associate advisors, Professor Nishith Prakash, Professor Kathleen Segerson, and Professor Richard Freeman from Harvard University.

Zheng’s dissertation studies how globalization has reshaped China in terms of the labor market, environment, and media. The first chapter examines how rising demand for Chinese exports affects Chinese labor markets. Particular emphasis is given to how the massive internal migration in China shapes the labor market consequences of trade. The second chapter studies whether party-newspapers in China are less likely to report local pollution events and whether the difference distorts households’ self-protective behaviors against potential health risks. The third chapter uses the list of environmental goods endorsed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to test whether export production improves air quality in China through adoption of green inputs.

Since September of 2013, Zheng has been a research fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. In 2014, he received a CLAS Graduate Fellowship which helped support his time at Harvard. Zheng has already started a new position as postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.

Congratulations, Zheng!

Sining Wang at IFREE

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IFREE-logoAs other graduate students battle the winter snow, PhD student Sining Wang will be spending a week in January in Southern California. Sining has been selected to participate in IFREE’s Twentieth Annual Visiting Graduate Student Workshop in Experimental Economics. IFREE is the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics and was established in 1997 by Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering research bringing experimental methods to economics. The workshop will be held at Chapman University, Vernon Smith’s academic home. In the week-long session, Sining will participate in experiments, learn about experimental results and techniques, and have a chance to present his own research to leading faculty in experimental economics.

Xiaoming Li defends dissertation and heads to Freddie Mac

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Xiaoming Li defended his PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Ross on Monday, April 25, 2011.

Theoretical models and empirical analyses argue that mortgage underwriting is a dynamic process in which previous mortgage and housing market conditions affect current mortgage approvals. Neighborhoods likely differ in important ways and over important events or shocks that influence both housing prices and mortgage underwriting decisions. This potential endogeneity complicates the causal analyses and failure to control for neighborhood heterogeneity risks confounding spurious and true state dependence. Xiaoming’s dissertation attempts to examine the housing dynamics and distinguish between sources of time persistence on neighborhood mortgage underwriting. Specifically, Xiaoming extends traditional and recently developed dynamic panel data techniques for use of repeated, clustered cross-sectional individual mortgage applications linearly and nonlinearly, respectively.

Xiaoming now heads to Freddie Mac as a Credit & Prepayment Modeling, Senior. We wish him the best of luck!

Alumna Yanna Wu reports on life after UConn

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Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke could unfortunately not make it to the “Life after UConn” event organized by the Association of Graduate Students in Economics last Friday. Instead, Yanna Wu spoke.

Dr. Wu graduated with a Ph.D. in economics from UConn in 2004, under the supervision of Prof. Ray. Right after that, she joined PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. in their New York office. She currently is a manager in the transfer-pricing group, which is a part of the tax practice, providing tax and economic consulting services for multinational enterprises on their inter-company pricing arrangements. Transfer pricing is a multidisciplinary field that encompasses accounting, tax, economics, finance, and law. Her main responsibilities include project solicitation and management.

Dr. Wu covered the following topics: (i) the current job market for new Ph.D. graduates in economics; (ii) potential job opportunities; (iii) differences between working in academia and in industry; (iv) how graduate students can prepare for the job market; and (v) her experience. After the lecture, Dr. Wu answered questions from graduate students.

Juan-Pedro Garces defends his dissertation and heads South

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Juan-Pedro Garces defended on 4 August 2010 his dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Susan Randolph. The main topic of his dissertation is how education contributes to economic development. In one of the chapters, he pays special attention to the quality of education, trying to determine whether private schools deliver more educational quality than public ones, with special reference to the case of Chile, his native country. The dissertation also tackles the issue of the influence of population density on productivity, and how is affected by the level of education of the population. For this purpose, the study uses panel data on a sample of more than 100 countries, mostly developing ones. The third chapter of the dissertation focuses on institutions, testing the mainstream literature on the effects of institutional governance on economic growth and development. His work tries to determine the way in which the level of education affects institutional governance, finding a new channel through which education can enhance economic growth.

Juan-Pedro will be a visiting instructor at Wake Forest University, North Carolina.