Faculty activities

Prof. Zimmermann tours Europe

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Prof. Zimmermann is in Europe giving a series of lectures in Italy, Portugal and Germany. His trip started in Rimini, Italy, where he presented at the Rimini Conference in Economics Finance. He then headed to Varenna, Italy, where he attended the NBER Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar. His Italy portion of the journey concluded in Florence, where he gave two seminars at the European University Institute.

In Portugal, he presented and then participated in the concluding panel of a workshop on research evaluation at the University of Minho, in Braga. In Germany, he first participated in a meeting of the scientific board of the International Data Service Center at IZA, in Bonn, and concluded his trip with a presentation at a workshop on macroeconomics at the University of Mannheim.

Prof. Langlois reports about his travels in Europe

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Professor Richard Langlois is currently traveling in the United Kingdom as a Visiting Fellow of the Academy of Advanced International Management. He will be giving a series of talks in Lancaster, London, and Edinburgh. As part of the trip, he will also attend conferences in London, Scotland, and Denmark. Professor Langlois’s first stop in the UK was Nottingham, where he spoke at the Nottingham University Business School and touched base with UConn’s Marshall Scholar Michelle Prairie (pictured), who is completing her M. S. in Economics at Nottingham before moving on for another Masters degree at the London School of Economics in the fall.

On June 13 he visited the Lake District of Cumbria, where he discovered not only another Storrs but also a Storrs Hall, built in the 1790s and famously the home of John Bolton, a Liverpool ship owner who engaged in the “triangular trade” – including slaves – among Africa, the West Indies, and Britain.

Prof. Alpert contributes to American Thinker blog

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Why is there a remarkable stock market rally in the midst of the worst recession (depression) since 1930? While we hear explanations of every day’s rise and fall of the indices (e.g., the “whatever” numbers were not as bad as expected, or they were better than anticipated), the obvious answer is that a few serious investors have studied their (arcane) National Income and Product Accounting. The stock market is rising because extraordinarily high corporate profits are just around the corner. This is what Prof. Alpert writes in a contribution to the American Thinker blog.

American Thinker is a daily internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans. Contributors are accomplished in fields beyond journalism, and animated to write for the general public out of concern for the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda.

There is no limit to the topics appearing on American Thinker. National security in all its dimensions, strategic, economic, diplomatic, and military is emphasized. The right to exist and the survival of the State of Israel are of great importance to us. Business, science, technology, medicine, management, and economics in their practical and ethical dimensions are also emphasized, as is the state of American culture.

Prof. Zimmermann to speak at British Library event

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Prof. Christian Zimmermann is to speak at the end of the week at a conference at the British Library in London on subject repositories. These are collections or works and research, like the DigitalCommons at the University of Connecticut, but for subjects instead of institutions. The two prime examples of subject repositories are arXiv for Physics and RePEc for Economics. Prof. Zimmermann will talk about the latter, in particular how it came to grow with very little resources.

The conference will in particular feature the official launch of a new online service for Economists, the Nereus lead EconomistOnline portal, which at this point relies heavily on data from RePEc. Prof. Zimmermann will conclude his European trip by giving further talks at the German universities of Cologne, Dortmund, Giessen and Darmstadt.

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.

CLAS faculty snapshot features Prof. Segerson

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Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), has worked as an environmental economist for 25 years. She is an elected fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and is known for developing the Segerson mechanism, a policy for rewarding or penalizing farmers as a group for their agricultural pollution runoff. She is a science advisory board member for the Environmental Protection Agency and vice chairs a committee on how to value the impact of EPA rules on ecosystems.

Listen to the podcast of this snapshot.

Prof. Randolph works with UN Human Rights Commission

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The Right to Development, as established by the UN General Assembly in the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, enjoys growing international support. However the normative content of the right, though often referred to in international fora, has remained relatively opaque, and there has been concomitant difficulty for Member States and other actors both in determining the duties inherent in the right and in assessing whether or not those duties are being met at national and international levels.

Prof. Randolph has been commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to assist the High Level Task Force of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development in addressing that difficulty, and in particular in devising criteria to assess the implementation of the right. Working together with Maria Green, a lawyer specializing in Human Rights, her mandate is threefold: first, to establish a well-defined set of contours for the Right to Development to aid in effective operationalization and assessment; second, to devise a methodology for determining criteria, sub-criteria and indicators for use in
assessing implementation of the right; and third, to propose specific criteria, sub-criteria and indicators that might eventually be used as a basis for guidelines or a legal instrument on the right. The mandate additionally requires that the specific indicators proposed respond to the priority concerns of the international community as identified by the Working Group on the Right to Development including and going beyond those enumerated in Millennium Development Goal 8.

Prof. Langlois gives endowed lecture at Union College

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On October 1, 2009, Professor Richard Langlois spoke at Union College in Schenectady, New York, on the topic: “Creative Destruction: The Work of Joseph Schumpeter in his Day and Ours.” Jointly sponsored by the Engineering program and the Department of Economics at Union, the talk was supported by a donation from a college alumnus who wanted students and faculty to become more familiar with the work of Schumpeter, a Vienna-trained Harvard economist of the early twentieth century who stressed the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation in economic growth and insisted on the dynamic and often unstable nature of capitalism. As recently noted in this blog, Professor Langlois is the author of a 2007 book on the work of Schumpeter.

Prof. Zimmermann co-organizes conference on the Macroeconomics of Health

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Prof. Zimmermann is co-organizing a conference on the Macroeconomics of Health this week at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The study of health economics has traditionally been the realm of applied microeconomics. There is, however, an increasing awareness that health issues also have macroeconomic consequences. A prime example is the AIDS epidemic, which has fundamentally changed the labor market, as well as many other markets, in parts of Africa. Closer to home, the cost of health care is putting a new burden on governments and businesses; indeed, in his recent press conference, President Obama said that health care reform was at the forefront of economic and public policy. Also, demographic changes can change households’ saving behavior to a point of affecting capital accumulation and thus growth.

The conference seeks to build new synergies between macroeconomics and health economics, first by assembling the macroeconomists working on health issues, second by encouraging interaction with traditional health economists. The covered topics are broad, from the impact of tropical diseases on developing economies to health care reform in the United States.

For more details about the conference, see the UCSB Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance.

Prof. Zimmermann encourages blogging on economic research

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Blogs have become a popular medium to discuss all sorts of things, and this blog is an example of that. With the predicted decline of academic journals, new models of disseminating and discussing research are explored, and blogs could be one of them. In economics, however, most blogs are discussing current events and are rather politicized. Those that discuss research are few and unknown. To promote them, Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS) has created a year ago a blog aggregator devoted to economic research, Econ Academics. The future will tell whether research blogs will be successful.