Five Sewanee: University of the South professors were asked to share their thoughts on teaching in the Information Age, and our own Tao Song, PhD ’17, was one of them. See his reflections on how the explorer mentality guides his teaching.
In addition to his devotion to teaching at Sewanee, Tao remains committed to research. Together with Professor Delia Furtado, he recently published a chapter on interethnic marriages in the Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics.
While the department is not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty!
This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Shuo Han
Samuel Jackson
Tamara Shelley
Grace Smith
Khoa Tran
Yinuo Xiang
Ziyun Zhou
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Nidhi Nair
SeSe Nguyen
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Nadine Fernando
Prasad Gosavi
Pin Lyi
Choyang Wang
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Adem Aksoy
Allen Cazeau
Jeremy Salyer
Benjamin Scudder
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Erin McKeehan
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Shuyi Bian
Charles Triano Scholarship
John Doran
Beatrix Jordan
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Erik Choi
Ryan Durrel
Gregory Elmokian
Kevin Gabree
Prabhas KC
Joshua Waxman
Justin Wu
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Annaliesa Wood
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Cole Ensinger
Jordan Leonardi
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Ruohan Huang
Ziyun Wu
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Lindsey Buck
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Matthew Brown
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Kunze Li
Lulin Li
Ghania Shuaib
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Economics Department General Scholarship
Anastassiya Karaban
Best Third Year Paper Award
Jiaqi Wang
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Heshan Zhang
CLAS Summer Fellowship
Erdal Asker
Matthew Brown
Jingyun Chen
Jinsoon Cho
Zhenhao Gong
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Lulin Li
Yizhi Zhu
Faculty Awards
Grillo Family Research Award
Grillo Family Teaching Award
Congratulations to everyone!
On Tuesday, April 19th , Professor Furtado will participate in a webinar, “Who will care for aging baby boomers? Immigrants,” organized by the Center on Children and Families at Brookings. She will discuss her research on the relationship between immigrant labor and the quality of care provided in nursing homes. Others will discuss how immigrants make it easier for the elderly to “age-in-place” and for the children of elderly parents to remain in the labor force.
After the presentations, a panel of immigration and health care experts will discuss the country’s caregiving needs and policies that can help address them.
If you are interested in participating, register here. During the live event, viewers can submit questions via email to events@brookings.edu or on Twitter using #FutureofCaregiving.
Professor Delia Furtado’s paper “Who Goes on Disability when Times are Tough? The Role of Work Norms among Immigrants” has been published in the European Economic Review.
The paper considers how people’s views about the importance of work affect decisions to go on disability in response to rising unemployment rates.
See Professor Furtado’s tweets about the paper here.
Nursing homes are really struggling. We all witnessed the devastating number of Covid deaths in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Now, nursing homes are toiling with labor shortages that make it very difficult to provide adequate care for residents. While the immediate impacts of the pandemic will eventually stabilize, in the coming decades, nursing homes will need to cope with increases in the demand for their services as baby boomers age. How will an industry that has struggled to hire and keep enough workers even before the pandemic be able to address the increasing care needs of an aging population?
One potential solution: A more open immigration policy. Professor Delia Furtado’s new research shows that nursing homes in areas receiving more immigrants are able to provide better quality care for residents. She talked about why this might be on The Indicator Podcast. Part of this interview aired on All Things Considered.
In related work, PhD student Treena Goswami finds that older college-educated native-born women remain in the labor force longer when they live in areas with more immigrants. Her analysis suggests that when immigrants are available to provide inexpensive care-giving or housekeeping services, older women (who can afford these services) do not have to prematurely leave the labor force in order to provide full time care for loved ones. Further evidence that policies allowing for more immigration might help the U.S. address the care-giving needs of an aging population.
Professor Delia Furtado participated in the AEA 5K for the first time this year and won the 75th percentile prize. She ran faster than 25 percent of the other runners! Yes, also slower than 75 percent but never mind that.
The AEA 5K started three years ago when a couple of economists organized a race at the ASSA meetings and made t-shirts commemorating the occasion. Since the meetings this year are again virtual, the race and awards ceremony were also virtual. The full awards ceremony is available online.
Professor Furtado says she is aiming for the Caplin and Nalebuff Award next year. This prestigious award, named for the 1988 Econometrica paper, “On 64%-Majority Rule,” is given to the runner at the 64th percentile. Guido Imbens won the prize in last year’s AEA 5K. A few months later, he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Professor Delia Furtado is spending the 2021-22 academic year visiting the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
The Center brings together researchers from different disciplines across Harvard University with a common goal to “produce population-based evidence that will better inform policies needed to create healthy and resilient societies.” The Center has four main research focal areas: Social & Environmental Determinants of Population Health, Aging Societies, Workplace & Well-Being, and Social & Family Demography.
While all of Professor Furtado’s research touches on at least one of these broad areas, during her stay at the center, she will focus on her work on the impacts of immigrant labor on long-term care markets.
Although the department was not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty! This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Yulia Bragina
Tyler DiBrino
Kevin Fiddler
Melissa Mendez
Sueing Ngov
Shannon O’Connor
Gabriela Rodriguez
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Kelly-Anne Moffa
Katelyn Mooney
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Kevin Fiddler
Devin Pallanck
Gabriela Rodriguez
Yumeng Shao
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Marisa Infante
Spencer Kinyon
Linge Yang
Ajshe Zulfi
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Xiaofeng Gong
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
John Peterson
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Tyler DiBrino
Charles Triano Scholarship
Tiffany D’Andrea
James Rice
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Madeline Danziger
Zian Zhang
Robert J. Monte Scholarship
Luis Cruz
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Michelle Grieco
Mary Vlamis
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Lindsey Buck
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Yangkeun Yun
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Yijia Gao
Xuejian Gong
Ruohan Huang
Ha Kyeong Lee
Wensu Li
Miranda Mendiola Valdez
Ziyun Wu
Economics Department General Scholarship
Jingyun Chen
Chun Li
Jinning Wang
Heli Xu
Best Third Year Paper Award
Erdal Asker
Deepak Saraswat
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Treena Goswami
Huarui Jing
Anastassiya Karaban
Xizi Li
Shilpa Sethia
Rui Sun
Jiaqi Wang
Wei Zheng
Faculty Awards
Grillo Family Research Award
Grillo Family Teaching Award
Congratulations to everyone!
Mateen Karimi, a rising junior majoring in management, published his paper, “The Socioeconomic Integration of Second-Generation MENA Immigrants,” in the journal, Aisthesis, this past June. Each year, the journal publishes a compilation of scholarship completed by students in honors programs nationwide.
Supervised by Professor Furtado, Mateen conducted the analysis for the paper last summer as part of his Holster project.
The article shows that the native-born children of Middle Eastern North African (MENA) immigrants in the United States acquire more education and achieve higher salary incomes than both non-MENA whites and blacks, but falter on employment outcomes as a whole. Interestingly, second-generation Iranians and Yemenis acquire more education than both whites and blacks, but also have the highest unemployment rates.
Sophomore, Mateen Karimi, presented his Holster Research Project, “A Comparative Study: The Socioeconomic Integration of Second Generation MENA Immigrants” to an interested group of students, family members, and UConn faculty and staff this past Friday at the Konover Auditorium.
The Holster Scholars First Year Project supports a small number of students interested in conducting independent research during the summer after their freshman year at UConn. Students are first selected to take a one-credit course to develop their research proposals. Of those in the course, a select few students are awarded funding to complete their projects over the summer.
Mateen’s project, supervised by Professor Furtado, examines the socioeconomic status of second-generation Middle Eastern North African (MENA) immigrants in the United States. He found that while the native-born children of MENA immigrants have more years of schooling and higher incomes than white natives whose parents were both born in the U.S., MENA unemployment rates are substantially higher. Mateen’s results also suggest that despite the very high average education levels of first-generation MENA immigrants, second-generation MENA immigrants complete even more years of schooling than their foreign born parents.