Prof. Kenneth Couch has renewed his annual research contract with the Social Security Administration to conduct joint studies on Unexpected Lifecycle Events. This work focuses on a variety of unexpected lifecycle events on short and long-term economic well being. One line of research considers the impact of recessions on short and long-term economic well being along with preparedness for retirement. Other topics, such as the impact of changes in family structure on economic well-being and preparedness for retirement, are also being examined as part of the research. The contract allows Professor Couch to travel to Washington, DC regularly to work with researchers within the Social Security Administration on these projects.
Announcements
CCEA provides economic analysis that justifies massive state investment in UConn Health Center & Dempsey Hospital
On Tuesday, May 17, 2011, in the atrium of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine/Dentistry, Governor Malloy announced a $900 million investment to transform the Schools into an international leader in biomedical research, an investment that will generate more than nearly 3,000 construction jobs in the near term and 16,000 new jobs by 2037. Critically, the investment will generate sustained economic growth that delivers so much net new tax revenue to the state that the bonding is entirely self-financing–with a large revenue bonus for the state. The Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis provided the dynamic (REMI) economic analysis on with the Governor relied. Prof. Fred Carstensen, Director of CCEA, attended the event and provided both electronic and print media backup explanations of the details on the economic analysis. The Center currently employs three department graduate students and two more are participating in its summer work.
Prof. Aysun to leave department
Prof. Uluc Aysun will be leaving the department this Summer for the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. There, he will be joined by Melanie Guldi, currently Economics faculty at Mt. Holyoke College.
Prof. Aysun has been teaching macroeconomics, international economics and money and banking at the Stamford campus, as well as PhD international finance on the Storrs campus. His recent research has concentrated on financial frictions, emerging markets and the banking sector. We all wish Melanie, Uluc and the triplets a happy continuation in Florida.
Yonghong An to join the department
Yonghong An will be joining the department this Fall as assistant professor. A graduate from Johns Hopking University and a Chinese citizen, he is an econometrician with a particular interest in applications to industrial organization, for example the estimation of the distribution of buyer valuations in auctions, issues in the estimation of structural functions and measurement error in self-reported data. He has also published in the Journal of Econometrics.
Kasey Kniffin to join administrative staff
The department is pleased to announce the addition of Kasey Kniffin to the administrative staff of the economics department beginning on Monday, March 7th. Kasey’s primary responsibility will be to serve as the chief administrator of the graduate program, but her capabilities and experience will no doubt make her a valuable presence, along with Rosanne and Margie, in the overall operation of the department.
Since 2006 Kasey has been working as a legal administrative assistant at Diana, Conti, and Tunila, a law firm in Manchester. During that time she also worked as a sales associate at L.L. Bean and Pier 1 Imports, and previously she worked as a visitor assistant at Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado. Kasey received her paralegal certificate from UConn in 2005 and her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2004. Please stop by and welcome her next week.
Ling Huang to join department
Ling Huang, Economics PhD from Duke University and currently post-doc at the Fisheries Economics Research Unit of the University of British Columbia, will be joining the department as Assistant Professor next Fall. Her research interests center on investigating the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic outputs. Specifically, she is interested in evaluating the effectiveness of policies and impacts of resource exploitation, and discovering the underlying mechanisms.
Huang has conducted research on a wide range of topics in resource economics, including property rights and overexploitation of renewable resources, economic impact analysis of environmental stresses, impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, non-market evaluation, economic impact analysis of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, ‘green’ economy strategies and ecosystem-based management. She has published in Ecological Economics and Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science
This year’s AGES distinguished speaker: Carmen Reinhart
The Association of Graduate Economics Students (AGES) invites every year a prominent speaker to give a public lecture on campus. Over the past years, speakers included Greg Mankiw, Ariel Rubinstein and Karl Case as well as Nobel Laureates Finn Kydland and Robert Lucas. This year’s speaker will be Carmen Reinhart.
Prof. Reinhart is a specialist of financial crises and has extensively studied the many collapses in economic history. Her studies have recently culminated in a book with Kenneth Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press), which will be at the center of her talk February 24, 2011, at 11:00 AM in the Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center. The talk is open to the public.
Prof. Reinhart has a PhD from Columbia University and recently moved from the University of Maryland to the Peterson Institute of International Economics. She has been deputy research director at the International Monetary Fund and chief economist at Bear Stearns. She is currently the top ranked female economist.
More details at AGES.
Nishith Prakash to join department
Nishith Prakash will be joining the University of Connecticut in January 2012 as assistant professor on a joint position with the Department of Economics and the Human Rights Institute. He received his PhD in Economics from University of Houston, TX and his Master’s from Delhi School of Economics at University of Delhi, India. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University. His primary research interests are Development Economics, Labor Economics and Public Policy. In Development Economics, his current research focuses on understanding the effects of employment and political reservation policies in India on labor market outcomes, child labor and poverty. In Labor Economics, his research interests lie in analyzing returns to English-language skills, labor market discrimination, and occupational choices among minorities in India. He is also a research fellow both at IZA and CReAM.
Richard Suen to join faculty in Fall
Richard M. H. Suen has recently accepted to join next Fall the department as Assistant Professor. A native of Hong Kong, he obtained his undergraduate degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and then his PhD at the University of Rochester. He is currently at the University of California, Riverside.
Prof. Suen is a macroeconomist with both theoretical and applied interests. He has published on suburbanization in the International Economics Review, on process approximation in the Review of Economic Dynamics and growth theory in the Journal of Macroeconomics. His current research pertains to understanding the consequences of time preference as well as the link between technological progress and health care spending.
Chinese PhD student visits department for the term
Xiaofang Dong, from the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in China, is visiting the Department for joint research with Professor Stephen Ross in the area of urban economics. During her visit, she will be working on developing theoretical models of agglomeration economies.
She has a bachelors degree in Mathematics and masters degree in Finance and is currently in the fourth year of her PH.D program. Her research focuses on both urban and labor economics, including housing policy, unemployment, public-private wage differences, entrepreneurship and agglomeration economies in China. She has published her research in the China Economic Review.