Current students

Professor Jorge Agüero and Juan Campanario Receive 2016 ERAP Award

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Professor Jorge Agüero (faculty) and Juan Campanario (student) are the recipients of the 2016 Undergraduate Economics Research Award Program (ERAP).

Their work on their project “Can Growth and Redistribution Reduce the Influence of Colonial Institutions? The Case of Peru’s Mining Mita” will be supported through the ERAP program, which is designed to  assist research apprenticeships and research collaborations between undergraduate economics majors and economics faculty members.

The ERAP program enables the student to enhance research skills relevant to the field of economics, while the faculty member guides the project and provides mentorship. Only one award is given each academic year, with the student receiving a $1,500 fellowship and the faculty mentor receiving a $1,000 grant added to their departmental research accounts.

Congratulations to the award winning team!

Andrew Ju and Sungoh Kwon Receive ‘Best Third-Year Paper’ Awards

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Graduate students Andrew Ju and Sungoh Kwon have received the Department of Economics’ ‘Best Third-Year Paper’ awards for 2015-2016.

From the abstract of Andrew’s paper State Collective Bargaining Laws and Public-Private Sector Wage Differentials:

In recent years states across the country have considered restricting or eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees, thus sparking a national debate over the compensation of public sector workers. In this paper I contribute evidence to this debate by examining the effects of state collective bargaining laws on public-private sector wage differentials. Using data from the 2000 to 2014 CPS Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (MORG) and a variety of identification strategies, I  find that in states without mandatory collective bargaining laws state and local government workers earn approximately 7 percent less than their private sector counterparts. In contrast, in states with mandatory collective bargaining laws, state and local government workers earn approximately the same as their private sector counterparts.

I also find that state collective bargaining laws play an important role in determining the level of fringe benefits: local government employees in mandatory collective bargaining states have significantly higher probabilities of obtaining an employer-sponsored health insurance or pension plan.

From the abstract of Sungoh’s paper Does Public School Spending Raise Intergenerational Mobility?: Evidence from U.S. School Finance Reforms:

This study provSungoh Kwonides the first quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between public school spending and intergenerational mobility (IGM). Using a plausibly exogenous variation in school spending induced by U.S. court-mandated school finance reforms and county-by-cohort level measures of IGM, I found no evidence that the increase in public school spending raises future income rank of disadvantaged children in the national distribution, while there is evidence of a slight increase in the rank of advantaged children. When it comes to college attendance, I found that children similarly benefit from additional school spending regardless of family backgrounds. I discuss some possible explanations on the results.

Congratulations, Andrew and Sungoh!

Professors Harmon and Alpert Present Papers at the Southern Economic Association Meetings

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Professors Harmon and Alpert presented two papers at the Southern Economic Association meetings in November.

Harmon presented their paper with Robert Szarka, “Using Google Apps in Economics Courses” and Alpert presented their paper “Who Takes Online Courses at Public Universities?”

Harmon and Alpert also organized two sessions and discussed papers at two sessions. As a capstone Harmon organized and Professor Harmon chaired a panel discussion entitled Labor Market Transitions in the Great Recession featuring Professor Kenneth Couch and including Dr. Robert K Triest, of the Federal Reserve of Boston.

UConn Well Represented at Southern Economic Association Meetings

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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.

Advice to Economics Students

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Economics students, what can you do to protect yourselves against jokes such as the classic, “You could lay all the economists in the U.S. end to end and they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion?” or, “How many economists does it take to fail to change a light bulb?–Just three.  One to detect a faint glow in the bulb and forecast a stronger glow in the next quarter; one to advise the President that the bulb is too hot to touch at the present time and will remain so in the forseeable future; and one to write a grant proposal for a study of the effect of darkness on productivity.”

How can you answer such scurrilous slanders?  By arming yourselves with examples of economic theory’s successes, from the well-designed and profitable government auctions of the air waves to the lesser-known empirical study by Mark Walker and John Wooders showing that, in the serve and return game, pro tennis players play mixed strategy equilibria.  Dozens of examples available in Storrs (in your classes)–don’t leave home without them.

Best of Luck!

Vicki Knoblauch
Professor of Economics

PS  Faculty, Students and Members of the UConn economics community:  please send news you would like to share on our blog to Kasey.Kniffin@uconn.edu .

Yuriy Loukachev to Receive SHARE Award

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Economics undergraduate student Yuriy Loukachev has been selected to receive a 2012 SHARE (Social Science, Humanities, and Arts Research Experience) Award for undergraduate research. Yuriy will be studying the economic theory of auctions with Professor Mike Shor in the Spring of 2012. He will receive a stipend from the Office of Undergraduate Research, and will present the results of his research at a poster exhibition to be held in the Spring of 2012.

Congratulations Yuriy!

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.

Catalina Granda-Carvajal defends, heads to Universidad de Antioquia

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On June 21, 2011, Catalina Granda-Carvajal defended her dissertation, “Essays on the Macroeconomic Effects of the Unofficial Sector.”  Under the valuable supervision and support of her advisor, Prof. Christian Zimmermann, Catalina’s thesis focuses on how the unofficial sector and its intrinsic characteristics are related to aggregate fluctuations.  At an empirical level, she determines how business cycle stylized facts vary across countries with the extent of the shadow economy and compares the resulting patterns with predictions from existing models featuring underground activities.  Also, she incorporates an irregular sector into a real business cycle model to challenge the notion that fluctuations in the official and unofficial sectors are negatively correlated.  Using a similar theoretical framework, she finally addresses how informal firms’ limited access to credit affects macroeconomic and firm volatility.

Pieces of Catalina’s dissertation have been presented in a couple of international conferences and a section was selected for publication at the International Economic Journal last December.  In addition to her thesis, she has taken part in an interdisciplinary project on options for brownfields revitalization in Connecticut under the supervision of Prof. Kathleen Segerson.  She currently holds a tenure-track position at Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín (Colombia).

PhD student wins research prize

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Annually the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) holds a research paper competition. This year first-prize (making it a “Hirsh Prize Recipient”) was awarded to the paper “Calculating Return on Investment for US Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation,” authored by, among others, William E. Waite, a UConn 2nd year PhD student. The paper will be presented during the DAU Acquisition Community Symposium on Tuesday 12 April 2011, and published in April’s edition of Defense Acquisition Research Journal.

Within any complex organization there exists a need to measure and monitor the effectiveness of expenditures; that is, there is a ubiquitous necessity to monitor how well agents allocate limited resources between the many potential projects they are presented, within a specific institutional context. Such measurement is particularly challenging for institutions (or, in situations) where a market mechanism for pricing different outcomes is not available. The United States Department of Defense (US-DoD) is one such institution.

Each year, the US-DoD allocates billions of dollars to external contractors, as well as internal departments, to pursue modeling-and-simulation (M&S) projects. The benefits of these initiatives are generally not monetary – or easily convertible to a specific monetary value. Rather, the desired results are seen in measures of increased readiness of the country’s armed forces, better trained individuals, improvements in procedures or approaches that result in fewer human casualties during combat missions, and the like. Given the nature of these benefits, it is not surprising that measuring the “return-on-investment” (ROI) of a US-DoD M&S project presents government officials with a formidable challenge.

In “Calculating Return on Investment for US Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation,” the authors provide a systematic methodology to approach address this particular challenge. By utilizing a decision analysis framework based on the economic principle of utility maximization, the authors create a framework in which the US-DoD can obtain ROI-like results for ranking and evaluating projects, which can then be used in resource allocation decisions and analysis.