Furtado

Economics Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching

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!

Zheng Xu Defends Dissertation, Stays at Harvard

ZhengDefenseOn August 28th, Zheng Xu defended his dissertation, “Developing in the Era of Globalization: The Case of China” written under the supervision of major advisor Professor Delia Furtado and associate advisors, Professor Nishith Prakash, Professor Kathleen Segerson, and Professor Richard Freeman from Harvard University.

Zheng’s dissertation studies how globalization has reshaped China in terms of the labor market, environment, and media. The first chapter examines how rising demand for Chinese exports affects Chinese labor markets. Particular emphasis is given to how the massive internal migration in China shapes the labor market consequences of trade. The second chapter studies whether party-newspapers in China are less likely to report local pollution events and whether the difference distorts households’ self-protective behaviors against potential health risks. The third chapter uses the list of environmental goods endorsed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to test whether export production improves air quality in China through adoption of green inputs.

Since September of 2013, Zheng has been a research fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. In 2014, he received a CLAS Graduate Fellowship which helped support his time at Harvard. Zheng has already started a new position as postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.

Congratulations, Zheng!

Professor Delia Furtado wins Refereeing Prize

banner_economicWhile researchers typically have a horror story or two about unreasonable referees, most will agree that the peer review process is essential for producing good research. Unfortunately, the hard work of referees often goes unacknowledged due to the anonymous nature of their work. The Economic Journal has taken steps to thank the referees who have contributed “beyond the call of duty” with its annual referee prize. Professor Delia Furtado was awarded a prize for her referee work for the journal in 2012. More details here.    

Congratulations, Delia!

**For those new to the “peer review process,” please see a graphic depiction here.

Prof. Furtado to be granted tenure

Prof. Delia Furtado will start next academic year as a tenured Associated Professor of Economics.

Professor Furtado’s research to date has focused on immigration and ethnic assimilation. She has several well-cited papers on the economics of interethnic marriage, but has also worked on issues ranging from racial segregation to female labor force participation and fertility decisions. Her work has been published in Economic Inquiry, Journal of Population Economics, and the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings. Through her current fellowship at the Yale School of Public Health, she is moving into the area of immigrant health and specifically immigrant utilization of health-related public programs.

In addition to research, Prof. Furtado has been active in teaching labor economics at both the undergraduate and PhD levels at UConn. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.

Prof. Furtado to be on research leave at Yale

Professor Delia Furtado will be spending the 2010-2011 academic year visiting the Yale School of Public Health on a research fellowship. During her time at Yale, she plans to continue her research on ethnic networks, paying particular attention to their relationship with the take-up of health-related public services and health outcomes. She also hopes to initiate new studies in the fields of immigration and public health.

Professor Furtado is very much looking forward to having a year to concentrate on her research but will miss everyone at UConn. Luckily, New Haven isn’t so far away.

Prof. Furtado publishes in AER P&P

In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Prof. Delia Furtado and coauthor, Heinrich Hock (Mathematica Policy Research), explore the role of immigration in explaining the labor supply and fertility decisions of high-education U.S. native women. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that low-skilled immigration decreases the price of childcare services, making it easier for career-minded women to combine work and family. The authors find that large inflows of immigrants to a city attenuate the negative relationship between female labor force participation and fertility, which translates into an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home.

Relative to women in most other developed countries, American women have very high rates of labor force participation and fertility. This is especially remarkable given how many countries have family leave and subsidy policies that are far more generous than those in the United States. The results in this paper point to immigration as a partial explanation for this phenomenon. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skill native women. Prof. Furtado plans to continue this line of research in future work.

Each May, the AER Papers and Proceedings publishes a sampling of the papers presented at the Annual Meeting of American Economics Association. A working paper version of the article is available here.

Spring awards banquet honors students and faculty

On April 1, 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 were:

Omicron Delta Epsilon inductees:
Christopher Barrows Wagner
Christopher Basil
Anthony DeMaio
Tyler Gold
Adam Heidbreder
Christopher Martin
Christopher Miller
Nicole Myers
Daniel Peacock
Lukas Sosnow
Stephen Stephanou
Spencer Swan
Ryan Zuskowski

Undergraduate awards
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Lucia Caldari
Mark Connolly
Yixian Lai
Alex Upton

Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Alexander Bansak
Kevin Landry

Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Connor Grant
Michael Gurdjian
Thomas Knecht
Daniel Peacock
Brooke Smith
Kristina Sowin
Christopher Waldo
Gang Yin

Abraham Ribicoff Scholarship
Joseph Antelmi
Michael Bokoff
Philip Gorecki
William Kimball

Economics Department Scholarship
Alex Upton

Graduate awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Lei Chen

Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Maroula Khraiche

Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Michael Stone

Economics Department Graduate Fellowship
Elizabeth Kaletski
Lisi Shi
Robert Szarka
Wei Wang
Yuan Wang

Ross D. MacKinnon Graduate Fellowship
Leshui He

CLAS Dean’s Fund Graduate Fellowship
Matthiew Burnside
Maroula Khraiche
Xiaoming Li
Michael Stone

Faculty Awards
Grillo Family Research Award
Vicky Knoblauch

Grillo Family Teaching Award
Delia Furtado

Congratulations to all recipients!