Announcements

Department welcomes visitor Ralf Hepp for academic year

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Ralf Hepp is visiting the department for the 2009-10 academic year from Fordham University, New York, where he is an Assistant Professor of Economics. He has a Ph.D. in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. While he will mostly be conducting research during his sabbatical stay, he has accepted to teach an undergraduate course in International Finance.

His research interests lie mainly in open-economy macroeconomics and development economics. Most recently, he has written with co-author Jürgen von Hagen a couple of research papers on the German fiscal system. They have investigated the degree of income and consumption smoothing at the state level for the last four decades as well as risk-sharing properties of the system – a topic at the intersection of macroeconomics and public finance. Prof. Hepp is currently working on a project on financial liberalization and the role of capital controls and foreign exchange reserves in the economic development of emerging market economies.

Prof. Dharmapala to leave department

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After seven years with the department, Prof. Dharmapala is leaving us for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Hired as an assistant professor in 2002 following postdoctoral positions at Harvard and the Australian National University, he was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2008. A specialist in public finance who holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, Dharmapala’s interests also encompass tax policy, corporate finance, and the economic analysis of law.

At UIUC, Dharmapala will join the College of Law, which has a substantial group of scholars in Law and Economics. In addition, he will hold an appointment as Professor of Finance (by courtesy) in the College of Business. His wife, Jennifer Delaney, who holds a PhD from Stanford University’s School of Education, will join the faculty of the College of Education at UIUC. We regret the departure of one of our more outstanding professors, and wish him all the best in his new appointment.

Bill Lott to become interim department head

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Bill Lott will become Interim Head of the Department of Economics as of July 1, 2009. Dennis Heffley (IDEAS), who has served as Department Head for the past four years, recently announced that he would be stepping down from the position on June 30th and returning to full-time teaching and research. Jeremy Teitelbaum, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, subsequently announced that he would be appointing an Interim Head until a full search could take place.

Professor Lott is the Department’s senior member, having just completed his 40th year of service at UConn. Bill completed his PhD at North Carolina State University under the tutelage of prominent econometrician T. Dudley
Wallace, who later joined the Economics faculty at Duke. Lott regularly teaches Econometrics at the graduate level, as well as undergraduate courses in Mathematical Economics, Information Technology for Economists, and
Money & Banking. He and his colleague, Susan Randolph, have recently teamed up to conduct an analysis of the dispersion and growth of income inequality in Connecticut (see pdf). A follow-up paper on this subject is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2009 issue of The Connecticut Economy.