Faculty

Edward Elgar Publishes Handbook on Inequality and COVID-19 Edited by Professor Couch

Book cover.In this comprehensive Handbook, Professor Kenneth Couch of the University of Connecticut, Department of Economics, brings together expert contributors to provide insights into the impact of COVID-19 on new and pre-existing inequalities in health, work, and education. While sharper impacts on pre-existing cross-group disparities were often resolved by vaccinations and the lifting of restrictions, this important work indicates that in many respects disadvantaged groups will endure lasting negative effects from the pandemic.

An interdisciplinary and international range of authors investigate disparities in mortality, healthcare spending, domestic violence, and mental health for people of different genders, ethnicities, immigration statuses, and age, providing novel contributions to post-pandemic scholarship and introducing innovative empirical research. They emphasize the effect of the pandemic on the labor market, including  the ramifications on minority and migrant employment and the gender-specific outcomes of working from home. The Handbook also underscores the negative and heterogeneous effects of the pandemic on school enrollment, student well-being, and academic performance across all school ages. Ultimately, this Handbook provides a detailed overview of contemporary post-pandemic research into inequality.

Professor Tianxu Chen Awarded AI Teaching Innovation Mini-Grant

Professor Tianxu Chen has been awarded a 2025 AI Teaching Innovation Mini-Grant from UConn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The grant supports faculty in redesigning courses to help students engage directly with generative AI tools and concepts.

Professor Chen will integrate AI-focused activities into her undergraduate Labor Economics course, encouraging students to explore how technologies like generative AI are transforming labor markets and skill demands. The revised course will include hands-on assignments that build AI fluency, such as prompt engineering, critical evaluation of AI-generated content, and discussions on the ethical and economic implications of AI in the workplace.

The redesigned course will be implemented during the 2025–2026 academic year.

Spring 2025 GA Training Workshop: Supporting Graduate Instructors at Every Stage

On Monday, March 31st, 2025, the Economics Department held this semester’s Graduate Assistant (GA) Training Workshop, led by Professor Tianxu Chen, with Professor Ling Huang and Professor Kai Zhao also joining the discussion. The session provided a valuable opportunity for GAs to ask questions and receive guidance on a range of teaching-related topics, including student engagement, effective instruction strategies, and classroom management.

This semester’s workshop was structured as an open office hour, allowing all GAs—whether new or experienced—to bring up challenges they have encountered in their teaching roles. Professors Chen, Huang, and Zhao shared their insights and advice, helping students navigate common concerns such as fostering student participation, balancing grading responsibilities, and communicating effectively with undergraduate students.

This GA training workshop continues to play a crucial role in strengthening the quality of Economics education at UConn, while also reinforcing the Department’s commitment to supporting GAs in their teaching and career development.

Professor Langlois Publishes Advanced Introduction to the Economics of Organization

Book Cover of Advanced Introduction to the Economics of OrganizationProfessor Langlois’s book Advanced Introduction to the Economics of Organization has been published in the Elgar Advanced Introduction series:
This incisive book presents a succinct overview of the economics of organization. Combining traditional approaches with more challenging, cutting-edge perspectives, Richard N. Langlois critically examines the ways in which tasks and transactions in the economy are organized.

Drawing on a diverse array of historical and real-world examples, chapters outline key principles of the field including division of labor, transaction costs, moral hazard, and asset specificity. This Advanced Introduction investigates ‘organization’ more broadly, delving into underexplored areas such as capabilities and routines, evolutionary selection, dynamic transaction costs, and modular systems.

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration within “Money and Banking” Course at Stamford

Chains that Bind Us Bookcover
Photo: Bradford, Phillip G. 2023. “Chains that Bind Us”. Amazon Publishing, book cover. Used with permission of the author.

Students in Professor Smirnova’s “Money and Banking” course were exposed to a discussion about the block-chain technology from a viewpoint of the computer science as Dr. Phillip Bradford, Computer Science Professor at Stamford, delivered an engaging lecture “Chains that Bind Us” on February 27, 2025.

Professor Bradford connected the history of blockchains to the history of payment systems and functioning of Central Banks in an economy. He helped students understand the appeal of anonymous but verified ledgers of transactions, and linked such economic concepts as money supply, inflation, and economic growth to the development of various blockchain technology based “coins” and their fluctuating value in the market.

Professor Bradford demonstrated his Python codes and showed the “Raspberry Pis”, which he used in his experiment of mining bitcoins.

Dr. Bradford intrigued students with a basic ledger such as shown in Figure 1.

Basic Ledger (Bradford, 2023, p. 21)
Figure 1. Basic Ledger (Bradford, 2023, p. 21)

This ledger is itself coded. For example, the first account “CAFEBABE” is a keyword in Java program files. See for example: Java class file – Wikipedia sometimes called a magic number to start Java machine files. Do you see any code for #3 account “FED”?

Such ledgers are in each block of a block chain such as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Blockchain (Bradford, 2023, p. 116)
Figure 2. Blockchain (Bradford, 2023, p. 116)

 

The curriculum of the “Money and Banking” course focuses on the Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States, its policy tools, goals, strategy and tactics, and on the banking system as a participant in the country’s financial system. An exposition of new and emerging technologies that provide alternatives to central banking is an exciting addition to the course. Students are using Dr. Bradford’s book “Chains that Bind Us” (Bradford, 2023) as a supplemental reading material to the required textbook (Mishkin, 2022).

Such multi-disciplinary collaborations among faculty strengthen our learning community at the Stamford campus. Co-authoring papers and presentations, monthly multi-disciplinary colloquia, and visits to classes support diverse interests of our students that will be joining the workforce with career-transferable knowledge and skills.

 

Bibliography:

Bradford, Phillip G. 2023. Chains that Bind Us. Amazon Publishing.

Mishkin, Frederic S. 2022. Economics of Money and Banking Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, 13th edition, Pearson.

Professor Kai Zhao to be published in Review of Economic Studies

Professor Kai Zhao’s paper, “How Important Is Health Inequality for Lifetime Earnings Inequality?” (with Roozbeh Hosseini and Karen Kopecky), has been accepted for publication in the Review of Economic Studies, one of the top five academic journals in Economics.

In this paper, Professor Zhao and his coauthors examine an often-overlooked driver of economic inequality: health disparities. They show that health inequality is not just a reflection of broader economic disparities but a key driver of them.

Abstract:

Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks significantly reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated among the less educated and those in poor health. Next, we develop a life cycle model of labor supply featuring risky and heterogeneous frailty profiles that affect individuals’ productivity, likelihood of access to social insurance, disutility from work, mortality, and medical expenses. Individuals can either work or not work and apply for social security disability insurance (SSDI/SSI). Eliminating health inequality in our model reduces the variance of log lifetime (accumulated) earnings by 28 percent at age 55. About 60 percent of this effect is due to the impact of poor health on the probability of obtaining SSDI/SSI benefits. Despite this, we show that eliminating the SSDI/SSI program reduces ex ante welfare.

Storrs and Stamford Fed Challenge Teams at the Open House in Washington, DC

Storrs Fed Challenge Team at the Open House in Washington, DC
UConn Storrs 2024 Team: from left to right: back row: Professor Derek Johnson (faculty adviser), Spencer Thompson, Viren Chainani, Lilla Korniss, Claire Dobbins, Katrina Melnik, Professor Owen Svalestad (faculty adviser). Front row: Nameeda Elmi, William Infante, Evelyn Zhou and Rai Kumar

The Economics Department students participate in the College Fed Challenge national competition every year. The Storrs team competes in the Boston district of the Federal Reserve System, and the Stamford team competes in New York. In 2024, the Storrs team was a National Finalist, which is an exceptional achievement. In February 2025, both teams travelled to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC, for an Open House for all participants.

Stamford Fed Challenge Team at the Open House in Washington, DC
UConn Stamford 2024 Team: from left to right: back row: Matthew Dalzell, Thomas Surette, Angelina Solodka, Professor Smirnova (faculty adviser), Paul Juszczyk, Liz Maia, Madina Mamedli, Brenda Leon, Mallory Albrecht, front row: Cole Sembrot and Micthell Velasco.

In addition to summarizing results from the 2024 competition, the agenda of the Open House focused on showcasing various segments of the Fed’s functions and sharing career opportunities available at the Board for graduates with bachelor’s degrees. Participants heard from Brian Bonis, Assistant Secretary of the FOMC, Matt Eichner, Director of the Division of Reserve Bank Operations and Payment Systems, and a panel of former Fed Challenge participants, who are now employed as Research Assistants (RAs) at the Board.

The students of both teams were excited to participate in the Open House and are appreciative of the Economics Department as well as other entities that provided funding for this trip. The sponsors are the Business School, CLAS Dean’s Office, UConn Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills, and Stamford campus administration. Thank you!

Stamford Students Meet with UConn Alum in Washington, DC

During the trip to the Open House at the Federal Reserve Board, UConn-Stamford 2024 Team of the College Fed Challenge competition had an opportunity to meet with UConn alum, Misbah Seyal. Mr. Seyal is a real estate professional with a substantive career including various positions at Moody’s, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other financial services firms.

Headshot of Natalia Smirnova and Misbah Seyal
Natalia Smirnova, faculty, (left) and Misbah Seyal, UConn alum (BA’97, MBA’04), at dinner with students on February 6, 2025, in Washington, DC.

During the meeting with students, Misbah talked about career opportunities after graduation from UConn. He emphasized the importance of developing skills that could be transferred to the workplace and of being adaptable to labor market conditions as they change.

Students were interested in learning about the real estate sector as well as about the financial sector. They were curious about navigating the competitive market environment and about balancing career expectations and family. Misbah shared his wisdom and encouraged students to pursue their passions and dreams.

The students, as well as Dr. Smirnova, faculty adviser to the College Fed Challenge team, are grateful to Mr. Seyal for his time with us. We are also appreciative of Ms. Siobhan Lidington, Director of Development, School of Business, University of Connecticut Foundation, for her efforts to make this meeting possible.

Professor Miceli Publishes Harm and Responsibility

Professor Thomas Miceli has published  Harm and Responsibility: The Economic Factors Controlling the Extent of Civil and Criminal Liability

From the publisher:

Risk is an ever-present feature of life in a complex world, and it is important for societies to manage it in a just and efficient manner. One way to reduce risk is to assign responsibility for the associated harm. In this book, economist Thomas J. Miceli examines harm and responsibility from an economic perspective.

The book focuses on how responsibility affects people’s incentives to refrain from causing unnecessary harm to achieve what economists call optimal deterrence. Secondarily, it is concerned with the quest for justice. Defining this is part of the journey. Does it mean compensating victims for unavoidable losses? Does it involve punishing wrongdoers in proportion to the harm they have caused? Is there a clear answer? The book addresses these questions and more, explaining how, in some cases, these objectives will align with deterrence and in others they will not. The book discusses the ways that the law, tempered by religious and social norms, strikes a balance between these goals.

The principal areas of law that assign legal responsibility are tort law (for accidental harms) and criminal law (for intentional harms). There exist vibrant economic theories of both, and this volume draws on this literature. One theme that emerges is the role of causation in determining responsibility. Attributing responsibility for a given harm to the party that caused it seems both morally just (because it embodies personal responsibility), and economically desirable (because it achieves deterrence in the most direct manner). And yet the law departs from this prescription in any number of ways, both by limiting the responsibility of some who caused harm and by expanding responsibility to some who did not. The book offers readers coherent economic explanations for these departures from a purely causal basis for legal responsibility.

Author Thomas J. Miceli clarifies causation as reciprocal in nature and therefore not a uniquely defined concept. This means that when an action by A causes harm to B, the question is not how to restrain A but rather: whether A has the legal right to take the action in question or whether B has the right to prevent it. There will be a harm either way; the relevant question is which party should bear it. This insight ultimately leads to the fundamental problem of defining harm. In most conflicts this can be straightforward—as when A punches B—but in others it is more challenging. For example, when does free speech become hate speech? Where is the line drawn?

The book concludes by drawing out the implications of this fundamental ambiguity over the meaning of harm, what that means for the law, and what economic theory has to say about it.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74831-8