Faculty achievement

Professor Ray wins Lifetime Contribution Award

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Cooper Award 2016The International Data Envelopment Society (iDEAs) selected Professor Subhash Ray as this year’s winner of the William W. Cooper Lifetime Contribution Award in the field of Data Envelopment Analysis at the DEA2016 Conference recently held in Wuhan, China.

Professor William Cooper and his lifelong collaborator Abraham Charnes, along with their graduate student Eduardo Rhodes, developed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in 1978 as a nonparametric method of measuring efficiency that is especially useful for evaluating performance of non-profit organizations and government departments through benchmarking.

In 1979, while still a PhD student, Professor Ray started working on DEA and applied the newly developed method in a UNDP project to measure efficiency of primary health care centers in Costa Rica and Guatemala.

Over the past decades Professor Ray’s methodological and empirical contributions to the DEA literature have been published in leading Economics and Operations Research/Management Science journals including American Economic Review and Management Science.

His book Data Envelopment Analysis: Theory and Techniques for Economics and Operations Research published by Cambridge University Press in 2004 still continues to be a popular reference book for researchers in the field. He is a Senior Editor of The DEA Journal.

2016 Spring Awards Banquet

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Uconn sealOn April 14, the department convened for an awards banquet that recognized the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty. This year’s award recipients are:

Omicron Delta Epsilon inductees:

Odrine Belot
Isaac Blyakher
Justin Chan
Sadie Colcord
Cathleen Cormier
Raychel Decker
Geoffrey Donovan
Kelsey Duran
Peter Jiang
Kayla Joyce
Steven Joyce
Patrick Meucci
Kimberley Pepper
Kristina Petruff
Corrin Powell
Fariha Rashid
Matthew Regan
John Shea
Ryan Sherman
Chifan Shi
Josh Spadaro
Leo Villari
Makayla Wall


Undergraduate Awards

Louis D. Traurig Scholarship

Patrick Adams
Brendan Costello
Kayla Joyce
Kimberly Roland

Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize

Katherine Harrington

Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship

Chris Cunningham
William Johnston
Blazej Pulawski
Claudia Rodriguez

Ross Mayer Scholarship

Kimberley Pepper

Economics Department General Scholarship

Caitlin Delaney
Matthew DeLeon

Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship

Tasneem Ahmed

Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship

Andrew Carroll
Fariha Rashid
Joseph Roessler

Charles Triano Scholarship

Di Wu

Albert E. Waugh Scholarship

Ehi Osagie
Hao Ying

Economics Research Award Program

Professor Jorge Aguero & Juan Campanario


Graduate Awards

W. Harrison Carter Award

Tao Song

Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship

Aaron Cooke
Mike Dinardi

Economics Department Graduate Scholarship

Samantha Minieri

Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship

Wensu Li
Xizi Li
Tian Lou
Shilpa Sethia
Tao Song

Best 3rd-year Paper Award

Andrew Ju
Sungoh Kwon


Faculty Awards

Grillo Family Research Award

David Simon

Grillo Family Teaching Award

Nishith Prakash

Employee Appreciation Awards

Derek Johnson   10 years
Kenneth Couch   20 years
Susan Randolph   30 years
Francis Ahking   35 years

 
Congratulations to everyone!

Economics Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching

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The Provost’s office at the University of Connecticut regularly recognizes faculty members with excellent teaching evaluations commending them as achieving “excellence in teaching”.

A number of faculty members in the economics department have received this recognition in the past year:  Professors Talia Bar, Ken Couch, Delia Furtado, Paul Hallwood, Olivier Morand, Susan Randolph, Kathy Segerson, Mikhael Shor, Owen Svalestad, and Jackie Zhao.

Congratulations to these economics faculty for their important contributions to the educational mission of UConn!

Professor Ahking Publishes in the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement

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JEMProf. Ahking’s paper “Measuring U.S. business cycles: A comparison of two methods and two indicators of economic activities” has been published by the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 199-216, 2015.

The paper compares the performance of two economic time series in capturing the U.S. business cycle turning points using two statistical methods.

Professor Hallwood Wins Outstanding Researcher Award

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hallwoodProfessor Paul Hallwood last week was awarded the Outstanding Researcher award by the Avery Point Director, Professor Marty Wood.  The prize is awarded annually to faculty including the science departments.

The citations mentioned that Professor Hallwood is the author of 10 books and about 70 papers in refereed journals, and that he is active in applied work – notably in redesigning a tax system for the Scottish government and earlier as an economic advisor to the Government of Saudi Arabia.

Prof. Naknoi has paper accepted by JME

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JMEProf. Naknoi and co-author YiLi Chien (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) have their paper “The Risk Premium and Long-Run Global Imbalances” accepted for publication in the Journal of Monetary Economics. The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. trade deficits, given the assumption that U.S. investors take on more aggregate risk than foreign investors. It predicts that half of US trade deficits is sustainable. A copy of the working paper is available for download from RePEc.

 

Prof. Kathleen Segerson Honored by UConn Alumni Association

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segersonKathleen Segerson, Philip E. Austin Professor of Economics, has been awarded the 2013 University of Connecticut Distinguished Professor Award. 

The UConn Alumni Association established the Distinguished Professor award in 1976 for “an excellent teacher as well as an individual of international reputation whose scholarship reflects substantial credit to the University of Connecticut – a renaissance person.” 

Kathleen Segerson, an environmental economist, earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth and her doctorate in agricultural and resource economics from Cornell. She studies the incentive effects of alternative environmental policy instruments, including applications in groundwater contamination, hazardous waste management, land use regulation, and climate change. She’s also taken part in projects related to ecosystem services and to marine species protection.

Fellowships include the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, of which she has served as president and vice president, and the American Agricultural Economics Association. Kathleen is a member of the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences and a handling editor for the journal Conservation Biology.

She was co-editor and associate editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and an associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Past service also includes the Chartered Board of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and several advisory committees for the National Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Segerson will be honored at the Alumni Association Awards Celebration on Friday, October 11, 2013 at the UConn Storrs Campus, and the following day at the UConn Homecoming Game at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Connecticut.

Professor Prakash in the Media

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The London School of Economics has cited Professor Prakash’s paper on education and incentives in Bihar in their blog. The paper, titled “Education Policies and Practices: What Have We Learnt and the Road Ahead for Bihar,” has also been covered by Ideas for India, which Professor Prakash was invited to join earlier this year.

Professor Prakash has also published a non-technical summary of his paper “The Redistributive Effects of Political Reservation for Minorities: Evidence from India” in VOX. VOX is a policy portal that aims to promote research-based policy analysis and commentary by leading scholars.

Professor Nishith Prakash has been invited to Growth Week 2012, a three day conference held by the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics. Professor Prakash spent time at the IGC this summer as an academic visitor. The conference will be held from September 24-26.

Professor Prakash invited to join new India Policy Portal

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International Growth Centre
Professor Nishith Prakash was recently invited to join a newly formed online economics and policy portal for India, funded by the International Growth Centre (IGC). The portal will potentially become the go-to source for ideas and evidence on policy issues in India.  The portal’s goal is to be an ideologically neutral portal for researchers to discuss policies and ideas with a wide audience, and to encourage debate and analysis based on rigorous evidence.

Professor Prakash’s expertise and research in the Indian economy made him a sought after addition to the group. His “Cycling to School” project, which focuses on school attendance in rural India, is also funded by the IGC.