Prof. 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.
Since becoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) in 2014, Professor Ken Couch has invited a number of prominent researchers to join its editorial team. Scholars from American University, Berkeley, Cornell, Duke, Indiana, George Washington, Michigan, Oxford, NYU, Penn, RAND, UConn, USC, the Urban Institute, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Wisconsin are among this group. JPAM is a leading outlet for applied research on innovations in policy and management.
Professor Oskar Harmon recently presented on the topic “Using Facebook as a Discussion Board in an Online Class” at the 2nd Annual Online Learning Conference, at Post University, Waterbury CT, April 20, 2012. The theme of this year’s conference was “Driving Innovation in Online Higher Education.” Prof. Harmon organized a panel of instructors teaching online courses at Uconn. The session was titled “Innovative Active Learning Instructional Activities.” The other panel participants were Dan Mercier, Director of the Institute of Teaching and Learning, Andy DePalma, Professor of Continuing Studies, and Roger Travis, Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.
Professor Harmon was one of 16 invited participants to the Spring Workshop of Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics, at Carleton College, MN (March 25-27, 2012).
Starting Point is an NSF funded project that seeks to introduce economists to pedagogical innovations developed witnin and beyond the discipline of economics. The project develops research based instructional strategies to promote student learning in economics.
The Workshop participants spent an intensive 3 days planning, writing, reviewing, and editing instructional modules. The goal of the project is to create an online open source database of classroom-tested examples for instructors of core undergraduate economics courses. Harmon, a new convert of the project, believes it is visionary and in time will become an often consulted, and often used resource. Both for graduate-student instructors looking for teaching ideas, and to experienced instructors looking for new ideas to try out in their classroom. To read more about the Starting Point Project, click here. To view the current inventory of examples click here.
On February 24, Prof. Richard Langlois delivered a breakfast keynote address, entitled “Design, Institutions, and the Evolution of Platforms,” at George Mason University Law school. The presentation was part of a conference called “The Digital Inventor: How Entrepreneurs Compete on Platforms,” sponsored by the Law School’s Information Economy Project. Other speakers included David Teece from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley and Donald Rosenberg, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Qualcomm. Papers from the conference will appear later this year in a special issue of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Policy.
Today the challenge of economic and social rights fulfillment has never been more pressing. Despite global growth and rising per capita GDP, malnutrition, deaths from preventable disease and other forms of socioeconomic exclusion remain endemic: in 2010, the worst performing countries met less than 40% of their economic and social rights obligations.
Countries are bound under international law to respect, protect, and fulfill economic and social rights—but there are few viable tools to hold States accountable for meeting these human rights obligations. We are therefore pleased to announce the launch of a new website and online database for the Economic & Social Rights Empowerment Initiative.
At the core of the Initiative is the Index of Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF Index), which allows rigorous analysis regarding economic and social rights guaranteed under international law: the right to adequate food, right to education, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to adequate housing, the right to decent work, and the right to social security. SERF Index innovations permit cross-country comparisons in rights fulfillment, and objective assessment of whether the situation in a country is improving or deteriorating; consider countries’ available resources in determining rights obligations, as required by the legal principle of progressive realization; and provide a methodology to examine disparities in rights fulfillment between population sub-groups. These innovations create a powerful tool for civil society to hold governments accountable for fulfilling rights guaranteed under international law.
Please visit www.serfindex.org to learn more about the Initiative, access SERF Index cross-country data, and read associated research papers. The Economic & Social Rights Empowerment Initiative is a project initiated jointly by Prof. Susan Randolph at the University of Connecticut and her collaborators at the New School, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Terra Lawson-Remer, and is undertaken collaboratively with the Social Science Research Council.
IDEAS, a website using bibliographic data collected by the RePEc project and hosted at UConn by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, now features information about over one million articles, working papers, books, book chapters and software components in Economics. IDEAS is maintained by Prof. Zimmermann.
For more details, see the RePEc blog.
![ross[1]](https://econ.media.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/681/2012/03/ross1-257x300.jpg)
Congratulations to Profs. 