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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 here.
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.
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.
Prof. Deniz Ozabaci, visiting assistant professor, has accepted an appointment to the University of New Hampshire. The Department thanks her for her service and wishes her the very best in the future. Congratulations!
Photo L to R: Dennis Heffley, Perry Shapiro, Subhash Ray
Prof. Dennis Heffley retired from the Department of Economics after 41 years at the University of Connecticut, including 4 years as the Department Head, 2005-2009. About 45 family members, current and former colleagues, many former graduate students, and Dennis’s major adviser, Perry Shapiro, who traveled from California, gathered for a retirement party and to celebrate his many achievements in late December at the end of the fall semester.
Dennis expects to keep busy in his retirement and would love to hear from everybody. We thank Dennis for his many years of service to the Department and the University and wish him and his family the very best.
According to the latest RePEc rankings, the UConn Department of Economics is currently ranked 55 out of 491 U.S. institutions. This latest increase in ranking is a true reflection of the university’s recent investment towards national prominence. With continuing hard work from faculty and students, we expect our rise to continue in the future.