Announcements

Archita Banik defends, heads to Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

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Archita Banik defended her dissertation on Monday, July 22nd 2013. Her dissertation entitled “Three Essays on Health Economics” was completed under the supervision of her major advisor Dennis Heffley and associate advisors Thomas Miceli and Nishith Prakash.

Archita’s dissertation analyzes an incentive-based health insurance plan in the context of developing countries and also examines the importance of different socioeconomic factors and presence of microcredit in determining ever-married women’s health in the context of India. The first essay of her dissertation is a theoretical analysis where she analyzes an individual’s behavior with misperceived health risk under incentive-based health insurance plan vs. a conventional plan. The other two essays are empirical studies in the context of India where she shows that age, education, marital status, and presence of microcredit are important factors in determining ever-married women’s health in India.

Archita is heading to Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where she will join as a tenure-track assistant professor of economics starting from Fall.

Congratulations, Archita!

Congratulations to Alumnus Marius Jurgilas

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Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė recently signed a decree appointing Marius Jurgilas to the 5-member Board of the Lithuanian Central Bank. Marius was recommended for this appointment by the Advisory Council, a group of prominent economists in the field of finance.  He will assume his new responsibilities on May 15. 

Marius’ appointment to the Board reflects his extensive background, experience, and expertise in the banking sector.  He began developing this expertise during his time as a finance major in the Department of Economics at Vilnius University in Lithuania.  In 2001, he joined the Economics Department here at UConn, where he earned his PhD in 2007 with a field in monetary economics.  Christian Zimmermann, who is now at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, was his major advisor.  His dissertation was on “Interbank Markets under Currency Boards.” 

After finishing his PhD, Marius was an assistant professor at Elon University for a year but left Elon to take a position at the Bank of England, where he worked for three years.  Most recently, he has worked in the Financial Stability Research Department at the Norwegian Central Bank.  He has also spent time at the European Central Bank, SEB Vilniaus Bankas, and Lithuanian Savings Bank, and has been a visiting professor at ISM University of Management ant Economics in Vilnius. 

Marius’ research covers a wide range of topics relating to banking and housing.  Some of his recent publications include:

JURGILAS, M. & Lansing K. J., (2012 June 25 issue) “Housing bubbles and homeownership returns”, FRBSF Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

GUPTA, R., JURGILAS, M., KABUNDI A. & MILLER M. S. (2012), “Monetary Policy and

Housing Sector Dynamics in a Large-Scale Bayesian Vector Autoregressive Model” International Journal of Strategic Property Management, Vol 16(1): 1-20

GUPTA, R., JURGILAS, M., MILLER, M.S., & WYK, V.D. (2012 January), “Financial Market Liberalization, Monetary Policy, and Housing Sector Dynamics”, International Business and Economics Research Journal, Vol. 11(1).

 For more information about Marius’ appointment, click here.

Talia Bar to join Economics Department

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New faculty and staff headshots taken at the Anderson Center forDr. Talia Bar will be joining the department this Fall as an assistant professor. She graduated with a PhD. in economics from Yale University in 2003.  She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and her master’s degree in economics from the Hebrew University in Israel where she grew up. She has worked as an assistant professor at Cornell University, and as a visiting assistant professor at Binghamton University.   Bar’s research interests include industrial organization and microeconomics, mostly she works on firms’ research and development strategies and patent policy as well as issues in economics of higher education. Bar has published articles in, for example, the Journal of Economics Perspectives, the Journal of Labor Economics and the International Journal of Industrial Organization.

Professor Michael Carter to Visit Campus

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Michael_CarterOn Thursday, April 11, Professor Michael Carter will be on campus as the speaker for the annual Austin Forum on the Economics of Public Policy. Professor Carter directs the BASIS Program, a research consortium funded by USAID that studies rural poverty alleviation strategies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  He has worked extensively on understanding poverty traps and poverty dynamics, and on the design and evaluation of programs to alleviate rural poverty. 

In addition to giving his lecture at 4:00 p.m., Prof. Carter has graciously offered to speak in Prof. Randolph’s development course (2:00-3:15), as well as Prof. Furtado’s labor course (11:00-12:15).

At 4:00 p.m. in the Dodd Center, Prof. Carter will give a lecture titled “Global Poverty and Food Security: Perspectives and Options.” Faculty, staff, students, and non-university members are invited to attend.

Recent UConn Visitor accepts Position at Top 10 Chinese Research Institution

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Xiaofang Dong, who visited our department for a year and a half to work with Professor Stephen Ross on agglomeration economies, recently accepted a faculty position at Xiamen University in China.  Xiamen University was ranked 6th this year among research institutions in China.  Xiaofang recently completed her dissertation on Entreprenuership, Firm life cycle and Agglomeration Economics at the Southwest University of Finance and Economics, China.

Ph.D. candidate Leshui He presents at two conferences

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On April 11, Economics Ph.D. candidate Leshui He presented a paper at the Universitas 21 Doctoral Conference organized in Hartford by the UConn School of Business. UConn recently joined Universitas 21, which is a consortium of top universities in 13 countries. The doctoral conference brought to UConn graduate students and faculty from many member universities, providing Ph.D. students with comments on their work and an opportunity to meet and network with their counterparts from around the world. Leshui’s dissertation advisor, Professor Richard Langlois, who is a member of UConn’s Study Abroad Advisory Committee, served as discussant for a number of papers at the conference.

A few days later, on April 14, Leshui presented the same paper — titled “Subeconomy Meets Property Rights: A Theory of the Firm” — at the annual doctoral colloquium of the Consortium for Competitiveness and Cooperation (CCC), held this year at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland.

Professor Richard Langlois speaks at George Mason University Law School

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On February 24, Prof. Richard Langlois delivered a breakfast keynote address, entitled “Design, Institutions, and the Evolution of Platforms,” at George Mason University Law school. The presentation was part of a conference called “The Digital Inventor: How Entrepreneurs Compete on Platforms,” sponsored by the Law School’s Information Economy Project. Other speakers included David Teece from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley and Donald Rosenberg, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Qualcomm. Papers from the conference will appear later this year in a special issue of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Policy.

Professor Enrico Zaninotto Visiting From Italy

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Professor Enrico Zaninotto of the University of Trento, Italy, is visiting the Economics Department for the Spring semester 2012. Enrico was educated at the University of Venice and at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve. He joined the University of Trento in 1994, after stints at the University of Venice and the University L. Bocconi in Milan. At Trento he has served as vice rector and dean, and helped start what is now a well-regarded doctoral program in Economics. Enrico’s research interests are in the economics of organization, especially coordination theory and entrepreneurship and firm dynamics. (His resume is here.) Enrico is in Room 418 Monteith. Please stop by and introduce yourself.

Professor Ross Receives NIH Funding

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Professor Ross receives NIH funding to study the effect of friendship networks on the health behavior of adolescents.  Professor Ross with Professors Fletcher at Yale University and Cohen-Cole at the University of Maryland were awarded a major R21 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.  Under this award, they will develop and implement new approaches to identify the causal effect of the friendships that a student forms in school on key health related behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, weight gain and sexual relations.  In the proposed research, the authors will attempt to isolate the causal effect of friends from confounding factors, such as students sorting into specific friendships based on their unobservables or choosing friends who exhibit similar behaviors by exploiting across grade differences in the environment experienced by students whose families selected into the same school, but who happened to have children of slightly different ages.  One aim of their study will be to compare students who made very similar friendships as other students in the same school, but due to their grade were exposed to friends who exhibited different levels of smoking or drinking. In another aim, their study will the examine differences in friendship network structure between adjacent grades and the impact of those differences on health behaviors.

Prof. Carstensen on Swedish Television

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On Tuesday, December 7, Prof. Carstensen hosted more than a dozen foreign journalists at the request of the U.S. Department of State.  The journalists represented China, Bosnia, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and a slew of other countries.  Prof. Carstensen provided an overview of Connecticut’s economic performance and the new initiatives the Governor has implemented; he highlighted the importance of the Biosciences Connecticut development and the commitment of Jackson Labs to developing a major research facility in Farmington at UCHC.  Prof. Carstensen also discussed the current national economic situation and the complex situation with the euro narrowly and European economic health broadly.

Among those participating, was a film crew from Swedish television.  At the end of the lively discussion with the foreign journalists, the Swedish crew filmed a five minute interview with Prof. Carstensen, which was sent to Sweden for inclusion in a national news program.