Announcements

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.

Parag Waknis defends, heads to UMass-Dartmouth

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On Friday, September 9, 2011, Parag Waknis defended his dissertation titled “Essays on Economics of Leviathan Monetary and Fiscal Policies” under the supervision of Professor Christian Zimmermann.

Here is a short description of his dissertation: 

Time and again situations arise in various countries where fiscal policy drives the monetary policy. This might happen as a result of unusual situations like the current financial crisis or because of lack of sufficient tax revenues. There is not much literature modeling such policy environment using a money search framework. This dissertation aims to bridge this gap by modifying a much often-used money search model to include a Leviathan or a utility maximizing central bank. The first essay studies the nature of optimal monetary policy of this monetary authority. The analysis suggests multiple outcomes with actual realization depending on context specific factors. For example, fiscal profligacy is associated with higher inflation- a fact borne out by many actual examples. The second essay evaluates a thought exercise in institutional design to control inflation in such a context. It extends the model in the first essay to create an environment with currency competition and then shows that doing so leads to a better inflation outcome under reputation concerns. The third essay looks at the political economy of fiscal policy. To account for a typical developing country setting a model with differentiated political platforms and credit-constrained voters is laid out.  The credit-constrained voters depend on local public goods provision for smoothing consumption in the presence of shocks. The model’s implications are then tested with data on 17 Indian states for the period of 20 years. The data does lend substantive support to the contention that political cohesiveness affects the nature of spending. Put together, the three essays form a body of theoretical and empirical research shedding light on a monetary policy environment that features close connection with the fiscal policy.

Parag started his tenure track position on September 1, 2011, and relocated from New York City to New Bedford, MA.  Congratulations, Parag!

Paramita Dhar defends, heads to CCSU

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On 17th June, 2011, Paramita Dhar defended her dissertation entitled “Essays on the Economics of Housing” under the supervision of Prof. Stephen L. Ross.  Paramita’s dissertation examined two different questions about housing and location choice. In her first essay, she analyzed the impact of school quality on property values using a differences-in-differences strategy. In the other two essays of her dissertation, she focused on the issue of discrimination against minority homebuyers that might lead to the segregation of neighborhoods. In both of these essays she used fair housing audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study on three large minority groups in Los Angeles to examine the causes of spatial variation of the nature of discrimination.

This fall, Paramita will be heading to Central Connecticut State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Economics.

Ken Couch gives talks at NSF, Econometric Society, and Fed Conferences

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Ken Couch, an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics has been busy this summer with research presentations.  During May, he presented a paper at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco regarding economic outcomes of divorce.  In  June, Ken made a presentation at the Econometric Society Summer Meetings in St. Louis, MO of a paper co-authored with a recent UConn Ph.D., Tao Chen.  That paper examines the ability of econometricians to recover the results of a social experiment when random data are not available.  In June, Ken also made a presentation at a National Science Foundation conference in Fairfax Virginia on the use of interoperable administrative data for administrative and research purposes.