Faculty activities

Economic Rights Group Begins 6th Year

Posted on by

Initiated by Lanse Minkler (Economics) (IDEAS) and Shareen Hertel (Political Science) (IDEAS) in the fall of 2004, the Economic Rights Group (ERG) has grown to include sixteen UCONN faculty members and nine “Affilitate” scholars. Participating Economics faculty also include Samson Kimenyi, Susan Randolph (IDEAS), Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS), and, most recently, Thomas Miceli. But the group also features a wide range of scholars from departments and schools like Political Science, Sociology, and Geography, to Law, Social Work, and Medicine. The ERG operates under the umbrella of the Human Rights Institute, itself a result of the Human Rights Initiative of the university.

The central purpose of the ERG is to investigate issues surrounding the fundamental human right of to a decent standard of living, as described in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The group meets four or five times a semester to discuss seminal readings, and increasingly to consider original research generated by ERG members. Some of that research is included in the nascent ERG Working Paper Series. Additionally, the group meets at an annual day-long workshop to intensively investigate a specific topic annually. At this past April’s most recent ERG workshop in April 2009, for example, ERG members and affiliates presented their research on the state of economic rights in the U.S. The topic of the 2009 workshop mirrors the upcoming conference to be sponsored by the Human Rights Institute, entitled Human Rights in the USA.

Human Rights in the USA is an international three-day conference will take place from October 22 to October 24 that takes place at both the Storrs and Law School campuses. While we often think of human rights violations as only occurring elsewhere, the purpose this conference is to assess the state of human rights right here at home. There will be three economic rights themed panels: Economic Rights and Poverty; Katrina Through an Economic Rights Lens; and Researching Economic Rights in the USA. The entire UCONN community is invited to attend the conference and to learn about the state-of-the-art research in human rights.

For more information see: Economic Rights Group, Human Rights in the USA conference, Human Rights Institute.

Prof. Segerson president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Posted on by
Prof. Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), the Philip E. Austin Chair of Economics, was recently elected to a 2-year term as President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). AERE is an international professional association for economists working on the environment and natural resources. It was founded as a means for exchanging ideas, stimulating research, and promoting graduate training in environmental and resource economics. AERE currently has over 800 members from more than thirty nations, coming from academic institutions, the public sector, and private industry. It has two journals, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM) and the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP). It sponsors sessions at several meetings, including those held by the Allied Social Science Associations, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Southern Economic Association, and Western Economics Association International. Segerson has previously served as Vice-President and a member of the Board of Directors of AERE.

Prof. Zimmermann gives plenary talk at Open Access conference in Geneva

Posted on by

Prof. Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) spoke last week at the sixth CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6) in Geneva. This meeting assembles digital librarians from around the world as they discuss issues about the digital and open dissemination of research (open access).

Zimmermann’s talk discussed on how to engage a community in a research dissemination project by catering to the various incentives of its participants. By taking as example the RePEc Author Service he administers, he showed that one can push a major bibliographic project without any funding by letting everyone who benefits from it help out. This decentralization of the work has been critical to the success of RePEc.

Report examines impact of mass layoffs on workers’ long-term earnings

Posted on by

From the UConn Advance:

For workers losing jobs due to mass layoffs in the current economic downturn, the bad news is that more people than ever are looking for work right now, making it the toughest job market in at least two decades.

But for those lucky enough to find another job, there is more bad news: they will likely suffer lower wages for many years compared to similar workers who are not laid off.

A new study (pdf) from UConn and the Connecticut Department of Labor shows how the business cycle plays a determining role in the extent of wage losses for workers let go in mass layoffs and plant closings.

The study finds that for workers losing jobs during a recession, the damage to their earnings can linger for years. By contrast, for workers who lose jobs as part of a mass layoff or plant closure in more favorable times, long-term earnings losses are negligible.

Kenneth Couch (IDEAS), an associate professor of economics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, teamed up with researchers at the Connecticut Department of Labor, economist Nicholas Jolly (MA, PhD) and analyst Dana Placzek, for the study.

Read more in the UConn Advance

CLAS faculty snapshot features Prof. Ross

Posted on by

Stephen Ross (IDEAS) studies urban economics and how economic forces affect the lives of people in disadvantaged groups. One area he has studied closely is discrimination in mortgage lending. Another, which he began to track several years ago, is the subprime mortgage market. He saw a significant increase in risk in lending practices from 2004 to 2005 and 2006, when evidence mounted that risky loans were likely to lead to foreclosures.

Listen to the podcast of this snapshot.

UConn hosted RePEc Author Service has now 20,000 registered authors

Posted on by

The RePEc Author Service, managed by Prof. Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) and, since 2005, hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UConn, has reached a major milestone with its 20,000th registered author. This service allows economists to create an online profile of their works to be used by other services such as IDEAS (also hosted by CLAS). It also allows authors to obtain monthly updates on the online popularity and newly discovered citations of their works.

To put things in perspective, the largest association in economics is the American Economic Association, which has 18,000 members, including many outside the United States. The RePEc Author Service has authors in all US states and 119 countries.

Prof. Ross presents his research on mortgage lending discrimination at the Cleveland Fed

Posted on by

Professor Ross presented his research on mortgage lending discrimination as part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s conference on the Community Reinvestment Act on Feb 6, 2009. Professor Ross discussed the lessons learned from his research concerning the Boston Fed study and a major paired testing study of mortgage lending discrimination conducted by the Urban Institute. Professor Ross also discussed his experiences working as a consultant on a Fair Lending case for the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Professor Ross emphasized that a much of the discrimination in the mortgage market occurs because of the discretion available to individual loan officers or mortgage brokers, and discrimination is often non-existent at lenders that have good command and control systems. He recommended that fair lending investigations focus on lenders’ entire business model as opposed to just their fair lending monitoring systems.

For more see the Cleveland Fed website.

CLAS faculty snapshot features Richard Langlois

Posted on by

Prof. Langlois (IDEAS), who has been at UConn since 1983, studies the economics of organization – that is, why entities such as business firms are organized in a particular way. In the late 19th century, mass production of goods and the vertical integration of companies radically transformed the economy. In the late 20th century, independent suppliers and market coordination were more effective than large, vertically integrated corporations. Langlois argues that the type of organization that succeeds depends on the conditions of the economy at the time.

Listen to the podcast of this snapshot.

Prof. Ray presents series of workshops in India

Posted on by

During the recent winter break, UConn Economics professor, Subhash Ray (IDEAS), conducted a series of workshops in different parts of India. Professor Ray’s special area of expertise is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a nonparametric mathematical technique designed to evaluate the productivity and efficiency of both private and public enterprises. DEA addresses fundamental questions about how well decision-making units transform scarce inputs into valuable outputs, and even provides useful guidance on how to improve performance.

Professor Ray is one of the world’s leading experts on DEA, and his book (Data Envelopment Analysis: Theory and Techniques for Economics and Operations Research), published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press, has been heralded by other researchers in the field.

His tour included a 3-day workshop on Performance Measurement held at Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The January 2-4 workshop included three extended lectures on DEA, supplemented by hands-on, computer-based tutorials. Professor Ray was joined by Professor Subal Kumbhakar of Binghamton University (SUNY), who lectured on an alternative method of efficiency measurement known as Stochastic Frontier Analysis. Workshop attendees included corporate users of DEA as well as academic researchers.

Immediately after the Mumbai workshop, Professor Ray delivered a keynote address and two lectures on DEA at an international conference on efficiency evaluation (January 5-7), hosted by the Delhi School of Economics. Professor Ray also was asked to serve as an international member of the conference organizing committee.

On January 11-13, Professor Ray again was joined by Professor Kumbhakar to conduct a teaching workshop on efficiency analysis at the Madras School of Economics in Chennai (formerly Madras).

Through these workshops, and similar events over the years, Professor Ray has trained a cadre of young scholars who have contributed to productivity research and the further development of DEA.

Prof. Zimmermann on lecture tour in Europe

Posted on by

As part of his sabbatical semester last Fall, Professor Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) has given a series of talks through Europe, talking about various aspects of his research. At the Swiss National Bank, Universität St. Gallen, Banque de France and Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), he talked about the impact of bank capital regulation on credit. At the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva and Université de Toulouse, he talked about the interaction of malaria with the economy. At Universität Konstanz, he discussed his work with RePEc. He also gave five lectures on macroeconomic theory with heterogeneous agents at the Paris School of Economics.

In addition to his travels in Europe, Prof. Zimmermann spent several weeks at the University of California Santa Barbara, giving three lectures on the topics above and gave another talk at York University of his work on the economics of malaria.