Department achievement

UConn Storrs Fed Challenge Team Advances to National Finals

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Congratulations to the UConn Storrs Fed Challenge team!

Over the past few days, the undergraduate students on the Fed Challenge team competed in the Boston Federal Reserve (Boston Regional) Fed Challenge competition, and they excelled – first advancing to the Boston Regional Finals, and then advancing to the National Finals.

As a result, in November the team members will be presenting their economic forecasts and monetary policy recommendations to the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC. This is an exceptional achievement.

A brief recap of the Boston event…  On Friday, October 18th, the team competed with 23 other universities and colleges in the New England Boston Federal Reserve district. For the first round, the 24 teams (universities and colleges) were divided into six groups of four, with the winner of each group moving on to the Boston Regional Finals.

The UConn team won in its group, and earned its spot in the Regional Finals, joining the other five other Regional Finalists (Yale, Harvard, Wellesley, Babson and Dartmouth) to compete in a final round on Sunday. The final round would decide which three of the six Regional Finalists would move on to the National Finals.

UConn competed against the schools in the Regional Finals, presenting analyses of current macroeconomic conditions and monetary policy recommendations and fielding questions from Boston Federal Reserve economists.  The UConn team was outstanding, and by the end of the day had made it to the National Finals along with two other teams.

The three New England Universities to move on are Yale, Harvard and UConn.

Congratulations to our student team members for all of their hard work and accomplishments!

The students are:

            Viren Chainani (presenter)
            Spencer Thompson (presenter)
            Claire Dobbins (presenter)
            Rai Kumar (presenter)
            Katrina Melnik (presenter)
            Nameeda Elmi
            William Infante
            Lilla Korniss
            Evelyn Zhou
            John Mclean

The faculty advisors are Derek Johnson and Owen Svalestad.

UConn Ranks High for Economics Departments in CT

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A recent report from Zippia featuring the best Economics departments in Connecticut ranks the University of Connecticut near the top of the list, just below Yale:

These Are The 10 Best Colleges For Economics Majors In Connecticut

The report reviewed a total of 103 institutions of higher learning in Connecticut, and considered Career Results (earnings for graduates), Economics Emphasis (majors as a percentage of a graduating class), and School Performance (admissions, graduation rates, and cost).

Latest RePEc Rankings- Economics is Up

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oakleaf1According to the latest RePEc rankings, the UConn Department of Economics is currently ranked 55 out of 491 U.S. institutions. This latest increase in ranking is a true reflection of the university’s recent investment towards national prominence. With continuing hard work from faculty and students, we expect our rise to continue in the future.

See the rankings here: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.usecondept.html

Panel presentation featured on UConn Today

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The panel discussion held on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 was featured in articles on UConn Today and in the Daily Campus.  Professors Carstensen, Lanza, Minkler, Ross, and Wright led a discussion (moderated by Department Head Metin Cosgel) about the state of the U.S. economy and possible improvements.

Department 16th in “blog reputation ranking”

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According to a recent article in the Eastern Economic Journal, our department ranks 16th by reputation of their blogging faculty. The authors took a selection of the 85 most important economics blogs, then looked at the academic citation frequency of their regulator contributors. Prof. Richard Langlois, who regularly posts on Organizations and Markets ranks 9th by academic impact, and all by himself brings the department to a ranking of 16th. A possibly better ranking could have been in the cards if any of the blogs Prof. Christian Zimmermann contributes to had been included in the analysis: Against Monopoly, the RePEc blog and the NEP-DGE blog.

Department working paper series reaches 400 papers

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Working papers are the most popular way for economists to follow the frontiers of research. These preprints are released often several years before they appear in print in journals, and some working paper series become quite prestigious. The Economics Department also has a working paper series, which now encompasses over 400 works.

Our series is indexed in RePEc and Econlit, and is one of the largest contributors to UConn’s open access digital repository, DigitalCommons@UConn. Through RePEc alone, the series gets over 1000 unique downloads a month, the most popular one having been downloaded over 2000 times.

Department Fares Well in Recent Study

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The Department fared well in a recent study on the research output of 129 U.S. economics departments that offer PhD degrees [“A Guide to Graduate Study in Economics: Ranking Economics Departments by Fields of Expertise,” Therese C. Grijalva and Clifford Nowell, Southern Economic Journal, 74 (2008), 971-996]. In three of the 17 fields studied, UConn ranked within the top 20 programs:

4th in Law and Economics (after Berkeley, Harvard, and Vanderbilt);

12th in Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics (after U.Illinois-Chicago, Harvard, Syracuse, MIT, BC, Berkeley, FSU, Georgia State, Wayne State, Princeton, and UCSD); and

15th in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics (after Iowa State, NC State, Wyoming, Harvard, Yale, UCSB, MIT, URI, Georgetown, SUNY Binghamton, Stanford, Colorado, Utah State, and RPI).

To read the entire article, click here.