Faculty

Ling Huang to join department

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Ling Huang, Economics PhD from Duke University and currently post-doc at the Fisheries Economics Research Unit of the University of British Columbia, will be joining the department as Assistant Professor next Fall. Her research interests center on investigating the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic outputs. Specifically, she is interested in evaluating the effectiveness of policies and impacts of resource exploitation, and discovering the underlying mechanisms.

Huang has conducted research on a wide range of topics in resource economics, including property rights and overexploitation of renewable resources, economic impact analysis of environmental stresses, impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, non-market evaluation, economic impact analysis of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, ‘green’ economy strategies and ecosystem-based management. She has published in Ecological Economics and Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science

Prof. Randolph to receive NSF grant

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Prof. Susan Randolph has been informed that her NSF Grant Proposal, “Economic and Social Rights: Obstacle to Growth or Handmaiden of Growth?” has been rated “highest priority” and will be funded pending final approvals. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Terra Lawson-Remer both at New School are co-PIs on the grant. The grant request is for $233,000 and will be implemented over three years. The abstract of the grant appears below.

Countries are bound under international law to respect, protect, and fulfill the economic and social rights of their citizens. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) legally obligates countries to fulfill the rights enumerated therein to the maximum of available resources. This translates to an obligation of progressive realization—under which the level of obligation on each country differs according to its resource capacity, but all must move as expeditiously and effectively as possible towards rights fulfillment.
In the face of the progressive realization standard, measuring the extent to which countries meet their economic and human rights obligations has posed a challenge to scholars, human rights advocates, and the treaty monitoring body of the ICESCR. A central component of this project is the refinement and consolidation of an annual and longitudinal international social and economics rights fulfillment index (SERF Index) that for the first time makes the standard of progressive realization operational.
The second component of this project utilizes the SERF Index to address three empirical questions. First, is there a trade-off between meeting economic and social rights obligations and economic growth? Second, do some policies simultaneously foster the fulfillment of economic and social rights obligations and economic growth? Third, to what extent does a government’s success (or failure) to meet obligations under the ICESCR depend on direct ESR expenditures, the ability to raise revenues, and the interplay between the two? Cross-sectional and time-series econometric techniques are used to address the first two questions, while case studies are used to address the third.
As a whole, the project will promote greater understanding of the policies that promote economic and social rights, conflicts and synergies between those policies and other goals, and the political economy dynamics inducing countries to meet or shirk their obligations under the ICESCR. The project also develops and makes publicly accessible a rigorous assessment tool—the SERF Index—for use by scholars, human rights advocates, and UN Treaty bodies alike.

Nishith Prakash to join department

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Nishith Prakash will be joining the University of Connecticut in January 2012 as assistant professor on a joint position with the Department of Economics and the Human Rights Institute. He received his PhD in Economics from University of Houston, TX and his Master’s from Delhi School of Economics at University of Delhi, India. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University. His primary research interests are Development Economics, Labor Economics and Public Policy. In Development Economics, his current research focuses on understanding the effects of employment and political reservation policies in India on labor market outcomes, child labor and poverty. In Labor Economics, his research interests lie in analyzing returns to English-language skills, labor market discrimination, and occupational choices among minorities in India. He is also a research fellow both at IZA and CReAM.

Richard Suen to join faculty in Fall

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Richard M. H. Suen has recently accepted to join next Fall the department as Assistant Professor. A native of Hong Kong, he obtained his undergraduate degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and then his PhD at the University of Rochester. He is currently at the University of California, Riverside.

Prof. Suen is a macroeconomist with both theoretical and applied interests. He has published on suburbanization in the International Economics Review, on process approximation in the Review of Economic Dynamics and growth theory in the Journal of Macroeconomics. His current research pertains to understanding the consequences of time preference as well as the link between technological progress and health care spending.

Prof. Ross obtains major grant

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Stephen Ross is part of a team that combines researchers from Indiana University, New York University and Northwestern University that was recently awarded an $800,000 grant for their proposal “The Effects of Housing Instability on Children’s Education Outcomes.” This study will examine the effects of foreclosures in New York City plus three large school districts in California and Florida on the educational outcomes of children. The proposed research employs data sets that geographically links the foreclosure of specific buildings or housing units to longitudinal student administrative data in the following K-12 public school districts: New York City; San Diego, California; Fresno, California; and Pinellas (St. Petersburg/Clearwater), Florida. These districts are particularly appropriate for this study because each experienced widespread foreclosures recently, and New York City experienced other forms of housing upheavals, providing a rich context for linking housing instability to student outcomes. Longitudinal student level data will be available for all three sites for 2003 through 2008 allowing us to examine whether exposure to foreclosures or to neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates can explain changes in students test scores over time.

For details, see the MacArthur Foundation.

Graduate student publishes in International Economic Journal

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Current PhD student Catalina Granda-Carvajal (advisor Prof. Zimmermann) has recently published an article in the International Economic Journal. The last issue of this journal features a selection of the papers presented at the conference ‘Shadow Economy, Tax Policy and the Labor Markets in an International Comparison: Options for Economic Policy.’ This conference was held in Germany at the University of Potsdam last April, where Granda-Carvajal participated with the paper entitled ‘The Unofficial Economy and the Business Cycle: A Test for Theories.’ In this paper, she attempts to establish how the features of the business cycle vary across countries with the size of the unofficial sector. Granda-Carvajal confirms that countries with a large shadow economy exhibit higher volatility in major macroeconomic variables such as output, consumption and investment. Also, she shows that unemployment tends to be more countercyclical, while employment and hours behave as more procyclical the smaller is the unofficial economy. She concludes that much more needs to be done in order to understand the implications of shadow activities on macroeconomic performance, as standard models of the shadow economy do not imply such behavior for aggregate variables.

Prof. Segerson edits book on pollution control

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Prof. Segerson is the invited editor of a forthcoming volume on the Economics of Pollution Control, which is scheduled for publication in February 2011 by Edward Elgar Publishers. The book collects 26 previously published articles that provide a contemporary overview of this field. Rather than highlighting classic papers in the field, the volume focuses on more recent key contributions, highlighting advances in theory, models, and empirical methods that have occurred over the past ten to fifteen years. The included papers illustrate the wide range of contexts and ways in which the insights from economics in general, and environmental economics in particular, can inform current policy debates over pressing environmental issues. The volume is part of Elgar’s The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics series.

Prof. Heffley speaks in Athens

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Prof. Dennis Heffley recently participated in a keynote session at the 6th Pan-Hellenic Congress on Health Management, Economics, and Policy (Athens, Greece, December 15-18, 2010). The session, chaired by John Kyriopoulos (Professor and Director, Department of Health Economics, National School of Public Health, Athens), focused on efficiency in health care. Professor Heffley’s paper on “Location Choices of Health Care Providers” presented a theoretical framework for understanding the factors that potentially affect providers’ location decisions, as well as an empirical analysis of the distribution of general care dentists and dental specialists across Connecticut’s 169 townships. Other session participants included Tryfon Beazoglou (Professor, School of Dental Medicine, University of Connecticut Health Center), Nurhan Davutyan (Professor, Department of Economics and Department of Industrial Engineering, Marmara University, Istanbul), and Gareth Goddier (Chief Executive, Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, England).

Prof. Segerson Serves on National Academy of Sciences Panel

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Professor Kathleen Segerson has just finished serving on a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) charged with reviewing the Obama Administration’s draft revision of the federal “Principles and Guidelines” for water resources management. The Principles and Guidelines provide guidance to federal agencies involved in water project evaluation and planning and restoration. The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2007 mandated that these guidelines be revised to reflect current concerns, priorities and methods, and required that the proposed revisions be reviewed by the NAS. The revisions are intended, among other things, to ensure that the principles and guidelines embody the use of “best available economic principles and analytical techniques”. The Obama Administration issued a draft revision of the P&G document in December of 2009. A 13-member interdisciplinary panel was appointed by the NRC to review that draft and make recommendations for improvements. Segerson served as one of three economists on the panel. The panel’s report, which recommends significant changes to the proposed new guidelines as they relate to economic analysis, will be sent to the Obama Administration and released to the public on December 2.