Faculty

Professor Harmon participates in Metanoia Panel

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During the UConn Metanoia on Racism November 8. 2017, Professor Oskar Harmon participated in the panel: Taking a Knee, Raising a Fist: Race, Sport, and Politics in Historical Perspective, with Professors Joseph Cooper, Sport Management, and Jeffrey Ogbar, History.

The panel topic was the protest act of taking a knee during the pre-game ceremony of a football game was started in Sept 2016 by NFL player Colin Kaepernick.   President Trump’s Tweet: The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this! ignited a national referendum, and in the following weeks, taking a knee became a widespread event at professional football games.

At UConn, Metanoia has become tradition wherein the University community sponsors workshops and panels around an important issue confronting the university, the state, and the nation.  This semester the issue for Metanoia Day was racism.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/TogetherConfrontingRacism?src=hash

Professor Ross in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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Professor Ross was invited to write a commentary on measuring trends in discrimination.  Specifically, Professor Ross carefully lays out the potential, but also the challenges, of exploiting multiple field studies of discrimination combined with meta-analysis techniques in order to measure changes over time in the level of discrimination.  Professor Ross notes recent research in the same journal that shows very stable levels of employment discrimination against African-Americans over several decades in the U.S.  On the other hand, his own research has documented substantial declines in the level of housing discrimination, especially among real estate agents for owner-occupied housing. Below is a link to the commentary.

http://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10815.extract

JPAM 2017 Impact Factor: 3.42

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The most recently released (2017) Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2-Year Impact Factor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) is 3.42.

Based on the 2-Year Impact Factor, the journal has been ranked in the top 3 journals of Public Administration for 7 of the last 10 years including for the past 5 consecutive years.  In economics, the journal has been ranked in the top 40 journals for 5 of the last 10 years, including the last 3 consecutive years and in the top 50 journals in economics for 8 of the last 10 years.

JPAM is the journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM).  The University of Connecticut serves as the institutional host for the journal which is edited by Professor Ken Couch.

Professor Miceli’s The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

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Stanford University Press has just published the third edition of Thomas J. Miceli’s Law and Economics textbook.

From the publisher:

“Master teacher Thomas J. Miceli provides an introduction to law and economics that reveals how economic principles can explain the structure of the law and make it more efficient.

The third edition of this seminal textbook is thoroughly updated to include recent cases and the latest scholarship, with particular attention paid to torts, contracts, property rights, and the economics of crime. A new chapter organization, ideal for quarter- or semester-long courses, strengthens the book’s focus on unifying themes in the field.

As Miceli tells a cohesive, analytical “story” about law from a distinctly economic perspective, exercises and problems encourage students to deepen their knowledge.”

The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

Professor Zhao’s Article in VoxChina

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Kai ZhaoAn article by Professor Zhao and his coauthor Ayse Imrohoroglu (USC Marshall) has been posted on VoxChina.org, an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit platform recently initiated by Princeton together with a group of scholars from other institutions including UPenn and CUHK (Shenzhen).

In this article, they discuss their research on the determinants of the Chinese saving rates. They focus on the paper “The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics”, in which they find that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy is an important cause of the increase in China’s saving rate since 1980. This paper is the first major paper growing out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world.

Professor Zhao’s article can be found at: http://www.voxchina.org/show-3-43.html

Professor Jungbin Hwang to be Published in Econometric Theory

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Professor Jungbin Hwang and his co-author Yixiao Sun have had their paper, “Simple, Robust, and Accurate F and t Tests in Cointegrated Systems,” accepted by Econometric Theory  as a lead article in a future issue.

In this paper, they propose new, simple, and more accurate statistical tests in a cointegrated system that allows for endogenous regressors and serially dependent errors. The approach involves first transforming the time series using orthonormal basis functions in L-2 space, which have energy concentrated at low frequencies, and then running an augmented regression based on the transformed data and constructing the test statistics in the usual way. The F and t tests developed in this article, are extremely simple to implement have more accurate size in finite samples than existing tests such as the asymptotic chi-squared and normal tests based on the fully modified OLS estimator of Phillips and Hansen (1990) and can be made as powerful as the latter test.

Professor Hwang Publishes in Journal of Econometrics

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Professor Jungbin Hwang has published the paper “Asymptotic F and t tests in an efficient GMM setting” with his co-author Yixiao Sun in the Journal of Econometrics Volume 198, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 277-295.

In this paper, they propose a simple and easy-to-implement modification to the trinity of test statistics in the two-step efficient GMM setting and show that the modified test statistics are all asymptotically F distributed under the so-called fixed-smoothing asymptotics. The main contributions of this paper are developing convenient asymptotic F tests whose critical values, i.e., the standard F critical values, are readily available from standard statistical tables and programming environments. For testing a single restriction with a one-sided alternative, the paper also develops an asymptotic test theory using the standard t distribution as the reference distribution.

Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

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The American Economic Association has posted an interview with Karthik Muralidharan on “Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India“, the paper that he and Professor Nishith Prakash have published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

The interview is online at

Biking to a better future

An interview with Karthik Muralidharan about closing the education gender gap in India

Professor Prakash is following up on this work with his new project, ‘Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia’.  For more information, see Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

Graduate Students Presenting Their Work at Conferences

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Graduate students working on immigration issues with Professor Delia Furtado have been traveling quite a bit in the past few months.  Samantha Minieri was in Chicago presenting her paper, “Norms and Parental Leave: Do Home Country Policies Affect Immigrants,” at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA).

Tao Song has presented his job market paper, “Honey, Robots Shrunk My Wage! Native-Immigrant Wage Gaps and Skill Biased Technological Change,” at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)’s Workshop on Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market in Mannheim, Germany; the Society of Labor Economists’ annual meeting in Raleigh, NC; and the Western Economics Association International (WEAI) Annual meeting in San Diego, CA.

Also at the Western meetings, Tian Lou presented her paper, “Ethnic Segregation, Education, and Immigrants’ Labor Market Outcomes,​” and Haiyang Kong presented his paper, “What is the Impact of Industrial Structure on Immigrants’ English Language Fluency?”