Faculty

Professor Ken Couch Makes Presentation at U.S. Treasury

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Professor Ken Couch and his collaborator, Barbara Smith, of the Social Security Administration (SSA) gave a presentation along with a select group of researchers invited to appear at a one-day symposium at the U.S. Treasury in Washington, DC on Financial Security Research.  The research Couch and Smith presented focused on the impact of informational outreach by the SSA on retirement behavior in contrast to changes in the SSA retirement system itself.

Other presenters included faculty from Ohio State University, Penn, UCLA, USC, the University of Michigan and researchers from the Brookings Institution, the Upjohn Institute and the Employment Benefit Research Institute.  The Acting Commissioner of SSA was in attendance along with many Assistant and Deputy Commissioners and Secretaries of SSA and Treasury.

New Faculty Join Economics Department

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The Economics Department is happy to welcome four faculty who joined UConn at the beginning of the Fall Semester.  Chihwa (Duke) Kao, formerly at Syracuse University, joined the economics department as its new Department Head.  Kao is a renowned econometrician working on time series and panel data topics.

Jungbin Hwang also joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor this Fall after completing his Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego.  Hwang is also an econometrician working on panel data and time series topics.

Hyun Lee also joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.  Hyun is a macroeconomist who works on topics related to economic growth and policy analysis.

Patricia Ritter joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor following completion of her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.  Dr. Ritter works on topics at the intersection of development and health.

Welcome!

Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

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Professor Nishith Prakash’s project, ‘Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia’, has received generous funding from UBS-Optimus Foundation and World Bicycle Relief and will be in joint collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) at Yale University:

Many countries worldwide have made significant progress towards gender equality in education, labor force participation, and political representation in recent decades. However, in many developing and less developed countries, there also exist discriminatory social norms that favor early marriage and limit girl’s access to education and labor force participation. Therefore, it is not surprising that reducing gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education has been one of the most important goals for international education policy over the past decade, and has been enshrined as one of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s).

In this experimental study we aim to study the impact of providing cycles to girls in grade 7 and 8 on education and empowerment. The aim of this evaluation is to estimate the impact of World Bicycle Relief’s BEEP program in Zambia, which provides access to cycles to students who live far from schools in their communities. The study proposes to rigorously test the impact of cycle distribution on education outcomes as well as outcomes pertaining to girls’ empowerment and their bargaining position in the households.

This study will build on the previous study by Muralidharan and Prakash (2016) by testing if increased school access through cycles could create an enabling environment for girls to negotiate better health outcomes in addition to education outcomes. The study proposes to test the following hypotheses:

1)  What is the impact of providing cycles to adolescent girls on education outcomes such as attendance, drop outs and examination scores?

2)  What is the impact of providing cycles to adolescent girls on pregnancy, marriage, fertility, mobility, bargaining power, and empowerment?

https://sites.google.com/site/nishithprakash1978/field-projects

Harmon, Svalestad and Tomolonis present at CTREE 2016 Conference

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PCTREErofessors Oskar Harmon and Owen Svalestad, and Paul Tomolonis (PhD Candidate) participated in the Sixth Annual Conference on Teaching & Research in Economic Education, June 1 – 3, sponsored by the  American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education.

Oskar Harmon moderated the  panel session “The Experience of Managing a Team in the FED Challenge Competition: Pointers and Pitfalls”, and Owen Svalestad presented “The First Timer Experience”.

Oskar Harmon and Paul Tomolonis presented the paper “Can Social Media be an Effective Tool for Discussion in the Online Classroom?”.  The paper makes a comparison between the use of social media and traditional Course Management System (CMS) discussion groups in a fully online (Microeconomic Principles) course.  Using the experimental design of a randomized trial, the paper tests the popular hypothesis that students using social media (Facebook discussion group here) have greater engagement with the class and higher learning outcomes relative to students not using that platform for coursework (the CMS control group here) because of the ease of use and student familiarity with social media.  Our findings were contrary to this popular hypothesis with lower levels of engagement and learning outcomes for the Facebook groups compared to the CMS discussion groups. We attribute this to the more casual and less formal environment of social media compared to the CMS since students postings were shorter via the social media discussions.

Professor Ross’s Article in Vox

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An article by Professor Stephen Ross, co-authored with Stephen Billings and David Deming, has been posted on the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s policy portal, Vox:

Neighborhood spillovers in youth crime: Social interactions matter

In the article, Professor Ross and his co-authors discuss recent research on the mechanisms behind the neighborhood concentration of crime.  They focus on their recent NBER and HCEO working paper, in which they show that social relationships at school play a very important role in mediating neighborhood effects in youth crime.

 

Professor Ray wins Lifetime Contribution Award

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Cooper Award 2016The International Data Envelopment Society (iDEAs) selected Professor Subhash Ray as this year’s winner of the William W. Cooper Lifetime Contribution Award in the field of Data Envelopment Analysis at the DEA2016 Conference recently held in Wuhan, China.

Professor William Cooper and his lifelong collaborator Abraham Charnes, along with their graduate student Eduardo Rhodes, developed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in 1978 as a nonparametric method of measuring efficiency that is especially useful for evaluating performance of non-profit organizations and government departments through benchmarking.

In 1979, while still a PhD student, Professor Ray started working on DEA and applied the newly developed method in a UNDP project to measure efficiency of primary health care centers in Costa Rica and Guatemala.

Over the past decades Professor Ray’s methodological and empirical contributions to the DEA literature have been published in leading Economics and Operations Research/Management Science journals including American Economic Review and Management Science.

His book Data Envelopment Analysis: Theory and Techniques for Economics and Operations Research published by Cambridge University Press in 2004 still continues to be a popular reference book for researchers in the field. He is a Senior Editor of The DEA Journal.

Professor Baggio publishes in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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baggioProfessor Michele Baggio’s paper “Optimal management with reversible regime shifts” with Paul Fackler has been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

The paper examines the management of a natural resource, a fishery, subject to regime shifting dynamics.

Professor Zhao Presents His Research at the St. Louis Fed

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Kai ZhaoProfessor Zhao presented his research on the impact of health insurance policies on aggregate labor supply as part of the 2016 Seminar Series at the St. Louis Fed, on May 4, 2016.

In his research, he investigates whether or not the different health insurance policies in the United States and Europe can explain the fact that Americans work more hours than Europeans.

For more information, see the St. Louis Fed website.

Professors Alpert, Couch and Harmon publish in the American Economic Review

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The work of University of Connecticut Professors William Alpert, Kenneth Couch, and Oskar Harmon, entitled “A Randomized Assessment of Online Learning”, appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review.  The paper was selected for inclusion in the Papers and Proceedings issue after being submitted in response to a national call for papers on economic education.

The study provides the fourth randomized examination of online versus face-to-face education ever conducted for a semester length college course.  In this case, the course studied was microeconomic principles.  The study shows that students in a face-to-face course did about half a letter grade better than students in a purely online course developed consistent with best practices for online education. The study finds that there are no meaningful differences in performance when comparing students in a course with a blended versus face-to-face format.

Professor Harmon Participates in Voting Rights Panel

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Voting Rights PanelProf. Harmon was a panelist at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The panel addressed voter disenfranchisement including current/past court challenges to the Voting Rights Act, and stricter voting requirements, following passage of this landmark legislation.

The panel was moderated by Professor Beth Ginsberg (UConn Political Science).  The panelists were US Congressman Jim Hines; Scot X. Esdaile – CT NAACP State Chair; Professor Harmon; Khalilah L. Brown – Dean Quinnipiac University; Rev. Tommie Jackson – Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church; Michael Pollard – Chief of Staff for Stamford Mayor David Martin; Jasmine Pierre – Future 5 of NAACP; and Peggy Reeves – CT Secretary of State Election Affairs.

The event (April 11) was attended by approximately 75 students and community members.  It was held in the main concourse of the Stamford Campus.  It was organized by the staff of Congressman Jim Hines; Terrence Cheng, Director of the Stamford Campus; Jack Bryant, President NAACP Stamford Chapter; and Professors Ginsberg and Harmon as part of their Spring 2016 Service Learning Courses.