Langlois

Professor Langlois Provides Testimony to the UK House of Lords

langloisProfessor Richard Langlois was recently asked by a staffer of the UK House of Lords to contribute written testimony on an inquiry into “online platforms and the EU Digital Single Market.”

They wanted to hear about the concept of dynamic competition, and provided a set of questions to answer.

The testimony has now been published on Parliament’s website.

The Department mourns the loss of Prof. Kimenyi

Photo credit: BMI Murithi and Nation Media Group

kimenyi-picThe Department mourns the loss of one of its own. Prof. Kimenyi was a former member of the Department before leaving to join the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. According to BMI Muriithi of the Daily Nation, he passed away on Saturday, June 6, at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, after a long illness. BMI Muriithi’s article in Daily Nation is available here.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his wife, Irene, and his three sons. Condolences and sympathy can be sent to:  Irene Wangui Kimenyi , 2011 Wheaton Haven Court, Silver Springs, MD 20902.

 

The following is a note of memorium written by Prof. Richard Langlois:

A note in memorium of Mwangi S. (Samson) Kimenyi
from his friends and former colleagues at the University of Connecticut

We in the Department of Economics at the University of Connecticut were truly grieved to hear of Samson’s passing.

Samson came to us in 1991 and left to form KIPPRA in 1999, and was thereafter only sporadically in residence in Storrs. But he was with us for almost the entire decade of the nineties. We had hired him away from the University of Mississippi and awarded him the rank of Associate Professor less than five years after his Ph.D., which is an extraordinary rate of advancement. What attracted us to Samson was his astounding rate of publication, on a variety of topics. Among these publications was work on poverty in the United States, which focused on the importance of family structure – and which won the prize for best paper in the Southern Economic Journal. What we discovered after Samson had been with us a short while is that we had hired a wonderful man as well as a wonderful scholar. Those of us who came to know him well found that family was just not an intellectual interest for him but was part of his being, and we admired his devotion to his wife Irene and his three boys, who largely grew up here in Mansfield.

The problem with hiring a superstar, however, is that the world beckons. As Samson’s interests moved in the direction of African development, and as he became increasingly well known in that field, he was tapped to form KIPPRA and then called to the Brookings Institution. But we always considered Samson to have remained a member of our faculty in spirit. Many of us remember his visit part-way through the KIPPRA experience, which was memorable for a seminar in which he shared with us some of his accomplishments and challenges in Kenya.

In a way, we at UConn had already learned to miss Samson. Knowing that the parting is now final is a tragedy to us. But we will always remember his tenure here; and the spirit of his intellectual achievements and his warm personality will always remain part of our department legacy. We wish his family comfort in their time of grief.

 

Professor Langlois Visits UConn-in-London

uconnlondonOn September 18, Professor Richard Langlois met with the six students in this fall’s Business and Economics track of the UConn-in-London Program.  The students spend seven weeks taking two economics and business courses, then spend seven weeks on in internships with a London-based business.  (From left to right are Andrew Pierson, Curtis McLellan, Michael Jones, Ding Zhang, Nicole Nonnenmacher, and Ross Bauer.)

While in England, Professor Langlois also met with officials of the UConn London program; gave a talk at the University of Wolverhampton; and presented a paper at the Workshop on Institutions and Economic Change in Hitchin, Herts.

Ph.D. candidate Leshui He presents at two conferences

On April 11, Economics Ph.D. candidate Leshui He presented a paper at the Universitas 21 Doctoral Conference organized in Hartford by the UConn School of Business. UConn recently joined Universitas 21, which is a consortium of top universities in 13 countries. The doctoral conference brought to UConn graduate students and faculty from many member universities, providing Ph.D. students with comments on their work and an opportunity to meet and network with their counterparts from around the world. Leshui’s dissertation advisor, Professor Richard Langlois, who is a member of UConn’s Study Abroad Advisory Committee, served as discussant for a number of papers at the conference.

A few days later, on April 14, Leshui presented the same paper — titled “Subeconomy Meets Property Rights: A Theory of the Firm” — at the annual doctoral colloquium of the Consortium for Competitiveness and Cooperation (CCC), held this year at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland.

Professor Richard Langlois speaks at George Mason University Law School

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.

Prof. Langlois to be inducted in the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences

Prof. Langlois will be one of five inductees at the annual dinner meeting of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. It will take place in the North Reading Room of the Wilbur Cross Building on March 30.

The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was chartered by the State of Connecticut in 1799. It is the third oldest learned society in the United States. Its founders include Noah Webster and Ezra Stiles. Its official purpose is “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest and happiness of a free and virtuous people.” Currently, almost 60 University of Connecticut faculty are members of the Academy, including fellow department member Prof. Segerson

Prof. Langlois reports about his travels in Europe

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.

Department 16th in “blog reputation ranking”

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.