PhD profile

Spotlight on Alumni: Nicholas Jolly, PhD ’08, Promoted to Full Professor

Posted on by

Nicholas (Nick) Jolly, PhD ’08, was recently promoted to full professor of economics at Marquette University, effective beginning in the 2026–27 academic year. A labor economist, his research focuses on the labor market outcomes and adjustment processes of workers who experience involuntary job separations and work-limiting disabilities. He has also published research on collective bargaining agreements in professional sports.

Although nearly two decades have passed since Nick defended his dissertation, he remains closely connected to the department. Most recently, he coauthored a paper with Professor Delia Furtado in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy examining how immigrant labor may help address eldercare worker shortages in the United States. He also contributed, with several coauthors, a chapter on regional variation in COVID-19 vaccination rates to the Handbook on Inequality and COVID-19, edited by Professor Ken Couch.

Nick remains a devoted Huskies fan. He regularly returns to Connecticut during the summer to visit family and can often be spotted in the UConn Bookstore restocking his Husky gear. During his visits, he typically stops by the department and is always generous with his time meeting current PhD students and faculty. If you would like to connect with Nick — or simply congratulate him on his promotion — feel free to reach out to him.

To our other UConn economics alumni: if you have exciting career news to share, please contact economics@uconn.edu. We would love to hear from you.

Spotlight on Alumni: Huskies in Sewanee

Posted on by
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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by
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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.