Announcements

Professor Jorge Agüero and Juan Campanario Receive 2016 ERAP Award

Professor Jorge Agüero (faculty) and Juan Campanario (student) are the recipients of the 2016 Undergraduate Economics Research Award Program (ERAP).

Their work on their project “Can Growth and Redistribution Reduce the Influence of Colonial Institutions? The Case of Peru’s Mining Mita” will be supported through the ERAP program, which is designed to  assist research apprenticeships and research collaborations between undergraduate economics majors and economics faculty members.

The ERAP program enables the student to enhance research skills relevant to the field of economics, while the faculty member guides the project and provides mentorship. Only one award is given each academic year, with the student receiving a $1,500 fellowship and the faculty mentor receiving a $1,000 grant added to their departmental research accounts.

Congratulations to the award winning team!

Economics Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching

The Provost’s office at the University of Connecticut regularly recognizes faculty members with excellent teaching evaluations commending them as achieving “excellence in teaching”.

A number of faculty members in the economics department have received this recognition in the past year:  Professors Talia Bar, Ken Couch, Delia Furtado, Paul Hallwood, Olivier Morand, Susan Randolph, Kathy Segerson, Mikhael Shor, Owen Svalestad, and Jackie Zhao.

Congratulations to these economics faculty for their important contributions to the educational mission of UConn!

Huanan Xu Accepts Position at Indiana University South Bend

Huanan Xu, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics, has accepted a tenure track faculty position in the Judd Leighton School of Business and Economics at Indiana University South Bend.

The Leighton School offers M.B.A. degrees as well as other Masters level programs. IU South Bend has an enrollment of roughly 7,000 undergraduate and 550 graduate students.

Huanan’s thesis committee consists of Ken Couch (Chair), Delia Furtado, and Rob Fairlie (Cal-Santa Cruz).

Matthew Ross Accepts Post-Doc Position at Ohio State University

Matthew Ross, an Economics graduate student at UConn, has just accepted a three-year post-doctoral position at Ohio State University.

The position is part of a project jointly funded by the NSF and the NIH. Principal Investigators for the project include Joshua Hawley (John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State), Julia Lane (Wagner School of Public Affairs at NYU), Jason Owen-Smith (Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan) and Bruce Weinberg (Department of Economics, Ohio State University).   Ross’s thesis committee consists of Ken Couch (Chair), Delia Furtado, and Subhash Ray.

“Agents of Change” Film Screening at Stamford and Storrs

Professor Oskar Harmon has arranged for the screening of the film “Agents of Change” at the Stamford Campus (2/24 at 6:15 pm) and at the Konover Auditorium on the Storrs Campus (2/25 at 4:30 pm).

Admission is free, open to the public and will have a reception and post screening discussion with the co-producer Abby Ginzberg and writer Ibram Kendi. Also on 2/25 at the Storrs Campus, Abby will present a seminar on documentary film making, and Ibram will present a seminar on racism and diversity.

The film premiered Feb 11 at The 24th Annual Pan African Film and Arts Festival in Los Angeles, and won The Best Documentary Award

http://www.agentsofchangefilm.com

The event is co-sponsored by 12 UConn groups: Institute for African American Studies, Human Rights Institute, American Studies, Dodd Center, AAUP, Humanities Institute, El Instituto: The Institute of Latino, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Digital Media Center, UCONN Stamford, UCONN Student Government Association, The Connecticut Information Technology Institute and School of Business, and the UConn Stamford Economics Club.

Poster for the film Agents of Change

UConn Well Represented at Southern Economic Association Meetings

The UConn Economics Department was well represented by faculty and graduate students attending the annual Conference of the Southern Economics Association held in New Orleans at the beginning of the Thanksgiving break. Those in attendance included Jorge Agüero, Ken Couch, David Simon, William Alpert, Matt Ross, Tao Song, Ling Huang, and Oskar Harmon.

JPAM, Edited by Kenneth Couch at UConn, Ranked in Economics Top 40 and Top 3 of Public Administration

Based on Journal Citation Report data released this week, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) is ranked 31st within economics based on the two-year impact factor (2.58) and 37th based on the five-year impact factor (3.03) among 333 listed journals.

JPAM is also ranked second among 46 listed journals in the field of Public Administration using either the two or five-year impact factor. University of Connecticut Professor, Ken Couch, serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.

The Department mourns the loss of Prof. Kimenyi

Photo credit: BMI Murithi and Nation Media Group

kimenyi-picThe Department mourns the loss of one of its own. Prof. Kimenyi was a former member of the Department before leaving to join the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. According to BMI Muriithi of the Daily Nation, he passed away on Saturday, June 6, at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, after a long illness. BMI Muriithi’s article in Daily Nation is available.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his wife, Irene, and his three sons. Condolences and sympathy can be sent to:  Irene Wangui Kimenyi , 2011 Wheaton Haven Court, Silver Springs, MD 20902.

 

The following is a note of memorium written by Prof. Richard Langlois:

A note in memorium of Mwangi S. (Samson) Kimenyi
from his friends and former colleagues at the University of Connecticut

We in the Department of Economics at the University of Connecticut were truly grieved to hear of Samson’s passing.

Samson came to us in 1991 and left to form KIPPRA in 1999, and was thereafter only sporadically in residence in Storrs. But he was with us for almost the entire decade of the nineties. We had hired him away from the University of Mississippi and awarded him the rank of Associate Professor less than five years after his Ph.D., which is an extraordinary rate of advancement. What attracted us to Samson was his astounding rate of publication, on a variety of topics. Among these publications was work on poverty in the United States, which focused on the importance of family structure – and which won the prize for best paper in the Southern Economic Journal. What we discovered after Samson had been with us a short while is that we had hired a wonderful man as well as a wonderful scholar. Those of us who came to know him well found that family was just not an intellectual interest for him but was part of his being, and we admired his devotion to his wife Irene and his three boys, who largely grew up here in Mansfield.

The problem with hiring a superstar, however, is that the world beckons. As Samson’s interests moved in the direction of African development, and as he became increasingly well known in that field, he was tapped to form KIPPRA and then called to the Brookings Institution. But we always considered Samson to have remained a member of our faculty in spirit. Many of us remember his visit part-way through the KIPPRA experience, which was memorable for a seminar in which he shared with us some of his accomplishments and challenges in Kenya.

In a way, we at UConn had already learned to miss Samson. Knowing that the parting is now final is a tragedy to us. But we will always remember his tenure here; and the spirit of his intellectual achievements and his warm personality will always remain part of our department legacy. We wish his family comfort in their time of grief.

 

Professor Shor publishes in Operations Research Letters

505567Professor Mikhael Shor has had his paper, “How collaborative forecasting can reduce forecast accuracy,” accepted by Operations Research Letters.

The brief article compares an independent supplier and retailer who each forecast consumer demand with a jointly-profit-maximizing supplier and retailer who share their forecasts of consumer demand. The move from non-collaborative to collaborative forecasting can have the unexpected impact of decreasing demand forecast accuracy while still increasing profit. Therefore, collaborating firms should maintain a focus on profits, not forecast accuracy, as the appropriate measure of success.