Professor Kenneth Couch has made research presentations during the 2017 Spring semester at the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, the Wagner School at New York University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Michigan Retirement Research Consortium at the University of Michigan.
In each seminar Professor Couch discussed his research on the implications of rising longevity on Social Security programs. The research considers widely discussed reforms to the system to adjust benefit receipt in response to changing longevity and the distributional impacts of potential changes.
On February 21, 2017 Professor Oskar Harmon provided testimony before the Connecticut State Senate Labor and Public Employees Committee, in opposition to SB 596 – An Act Concerning the Definition of Managerial Employee.
On March 9, 2017 Professor Harmon provided testimony before the Connecticut State Assembly Higher Education Committee in opposition to HB 971 – An Act Concerning the Promotion of Transfer and Articulation Agreements.
The Program on Children “focuses on economic behavior related to children, child health, and child economic and social well being.” Professor Simon’s research interests include health inequality, policy and health capital accumulation, early life and childhood human capital accumulation, and public policy evaluation.
Professor Kanda Naknoi presented her work at the UC Irvine Macroeconomics Seminar on May 17. The title of her presentation was “Why Are Exchange Rates So Smooth? A Household Finance Explanation”.
On April 13, 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 are:
Omicron Delta Epsilon inductees:
Matthew Braccio
Zachary Console
Matthew DeLeon
Jennafer Fugal
Benjamin Hamel
Henry Hooper
Daniel Rodrigues
Claudia Rodriguez
Nandhana Sajeev
Akwasi Sarpong
Michael Scalise
Austin Song
Connor Todd
Alexandra Torchigana
Undergraduate Awards
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Patrick Adams
Andrew Carroll
Joshua Essick
Kayla Joyce
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Matthew DeLeon
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
William Johnston
Claudia Rodriguez
Alexander Rojas
Zihan Wang
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Tasneem Ahmed
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Yiting Jiang
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Tianyi Li
Roy Masha
Di Wu
Charles Triano Scholarship
Jennafer Fugal
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Tian Lou
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Andrew Ju
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Mark McInerney
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Aaron Cooke
Michael DiNardi
Jingwei Huang
Samantha Minieri
Tao Song
Kevin Wood
Wei Zheng
Professor Nishith Prakash presented his paper “Do Criminally Accused Politicians Affect Economic Outcomes? Evidence from India” at the 6th NCID Research Workshop in Madrid, and at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Professor Prakash was interviewed at the 6th NCID Research Workshop about his work:
Professor Stephen Ross and his coauthors, Jesse Kalinowski at Quinnipiac University and Matthew Ross at Ohio State University (both former Ph.D. students at UConn), have recently released on new working paper on racial discrimination in police traffic stops in Connecticut.
This research was selected by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group at the University of Chicago to be featured in their research spotlight series. The spotlight article can be found at:
Professor Nishith Prakash and his co-author Professor Kumar (Sam Houston State University) have had their paper titled “Effect of political decentralization and female leadership on institutional births and child mortality in Bihar” accepted for publication at Social Science & Medicine.
In this paper, they investigate the impacts of political decentralization and women reservation in rural local governance on institutional births and child mortality in the state of Bihar in India. Using difference-in-differences methodology, they find a significant positive association between political decentralization and institutional births. They also find that the increased participation of women at local governance led to increased survival rate of children belonging to richer households. They argue that their results are consistent with female leaders having policy preference for women and child well-being.
This project was funded by International Growth Center at London School of Economics (http://www.theigc.org).
