Faculty

Prof. Couch publishes in American Economic Review

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An article based on the work of Prof. Kenneth Couch that examines the experiences of workers who have lost jobs they held for a long time is contained in the current issue of the American Economic Review. The paper, entitled “Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers Revisited“, is co-authored with Dana Placzek who is a research analyst for the Connecticut Department of Labor. The research makes use of state administrative records to show that workers displaced due to large-scale layoffs and plant closures experience sustained earnings losses. Those losses are seen as the proportion of earnings attributable to specific human capital. The analysis also demonstrates that the size of the earnings losses depends heavily on whether workers take Unemployment Insurance benefits during the period of job transition.

The same research project that resulted in this publication in the centennial issue of the American Economic Review (Volume 100, Issue 1) also resulted in an additional publication in Research on Aging regarding specific experiences of older displaced workers in Connecticut that was co-authored with Dana Placzek and Nicholas Jolly, when he was a graduate student in our program. Additional work from this project showing the impact of the business cycle on the depth of earnings losses is still under review.

Summer 2010 Issue of The Connecticut Economy: Summer Fun with a Dose of Reality

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A rising tide of shopping and recreation activity along with a small surge in jobs offer hints that the recovery is making some waves. But the state’s budget crunch reminds us that it is still no day at the beach for Connecticut’s economy. With the economic climate improving, the Summer 2010 issue of ‘The Connecticut Economy: A University of Connecticut Quarterly Review’ explores the potential for baseball and winemaking to spur economic development. Mindful of the economic risks ahead, the magazine also examines the looming threat of the state’s unfunded pension liabilities.

A guest commentary by Robert Santy, President and CEO of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, examines the convergence of forces that gave rise to the state’s 30 vineyards, making them a vibrant tourist draw and potential source of economic growth. Santy also spoke and responded to media questions at the June 8th press release of the summer issue at CERC’s Rocky Hill headquarters.

Rumor has it that Connecticut could be in line for a major-league baseball team. The state has a rich heritage of professional baseball (surely you recall the Hartford Dark Blues and the New Haven Elm Citys), and the Tampa Bay Rays — despite being perennial contenders in the American League East– cannot seem to attract a crowd in their current home. Executive Editor Steven Lanza analyzes the logic behind such a move and the potential benefits to the Nutmeg State of relocating the Tampa Bay team to “a geographic ‘sweet spot’ midway between Gotham and Beantown.”

Connecticut may need a good diversion: its unfunded liability for state retiree pensions and benefits totals $7,395 for every state resident, based on 2009 Census population figures. Compared with more populous states, Nutmeggers’ liability is 2.6 times New York’s, 3.2 times Massachusetts’, and 4.4 times California’s. Quarterly co-editor Arthur Wright and UConn economics professor emeritus Peter Barth examine the available “solutions” as Connecticut tries to honor its retirement promises to state employees.

Commercial winemaking in Connecticut began in the mid-1970s, and the industry, as in other states, has sought to encourage growth by promoting “wine tourism.” The spillover benefits of winemaking to other businesses–food, lodging, and entertainment–and its compatibility with farmland preservation goals might justify targeted subsidies or tax credits, similar to those offered to the film industry. Co-editor Dennis Heffley and graduate students Christopher Jeffords and Jeremy Jelliffe examine the features of winemaking that might warrant a public effort to promote its production, but they also note that such policies are not universally endorsed.

Other features of the summer issue include summaries of recent data and forecasts for the state’s largest labor market areas, as well as a centerfold map of public library resources and usage in each of the state’s 169 towns.

For free access to this and other issues of The Connecticut Economy, visit: http://cteconomy.uconn.edu/.

Lei Chen defends, takes positions at UConn

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Lei Chen defended his dissertation in April 2010. His thesis focused on the productivity and efficiency of general dental practices in the U.S. His research lies at the intersection of applied microeconomics, health economics, and operations research. He is going to take a joint position of assistant professor in residence at UConn Health Center and UConn Avery Point. During his study at our department, Lei worked with his major advisor, Prof. Subhash Ray on a variety of projects and published a couple of papers in journals such as the International Journal of Production Economics and the Indian Economic Review.

At the UConn Health Center, Lei will continue doing empirical studies in dental care, especially the effectiveness and efficiency of dental services at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). He will also teach principles of macroeconomics and principles of microeconomics at the UConn Avery Point campus in the next academic year.

Prof. Kimenyi joined by PhD Alum at Brookings

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Prof. Kimenyi is currently a Senior Fellow at the Brookings institution where he is working for the Africa Growth Initiative. He has recently been joined there by Ezra Suruma, a 1976 Economics PhD from UConn who completed his dissertation under the supervision of Morris Singer.

After his PhD, Suruma taught at Florida A&M University, Makerere University (Uganda) and Coppin State University (Maryland), at the latter as department head. He then started an administrative career in Uganda, first at the (central) bank of Uganda, 1987 as the Director of Research, 1990 as Deputy Governor. After various stints in commercial banks, in 2005, he was appointed 2005 as Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development of Uganda. In 2008, he received from The Banker (Financial Times, UK) an award as the best Finance Minister in Africa. Since 2009, he has been a Senior Presidential Advisor for Finance and Planning.

At Brookings, Kimenyi and Suruma are trying trying to influence development policy both in Africa and the United States and OECD. They interact also regularly with policy makers at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and other development institutions and foundations that focus on development. Prof. Kimenyi is in particular pushing for a food security initiatives and overall transformation of African Agriculture. He is also working on natural resource management and industrial policies. Ezra Suruma is writing a book on the growth success story in Uganda over the last decade.

Read more at the East African.

Mikhael Shor to join department

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Mikhael Shor, currently Assistant Professor of Economics at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, will be joining the department in Fall 2011. He specializes in the study of behavioral game theory and its applications to firm-level decision making. Professor Shor has authored many scholarly articles on auctions, behavioral aspects of marketing, and electronic commerce. His research has appeared in such journals as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Management Information Systems, Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Psychology, and Contemporary Accounting Research. He has participated in merger analysis and strategic game theory consulting for the Federal Trade Commission and several companies. research interests are in game theory, industrial organization, and experimental economics. His current theoretical research is on the implications of mergers in auction markets, and my experimental research (supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health) is on decision making when faced with an overwhelming number of options.

Professor Shor has taught game theory, industrial organization, pricing strategies, economics of networks, and law and economics. His educational innovations and materials have been featured in Science, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Shor holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD from Rutgers University. He is living in Coventry with two kids, Eliana and Jacob, and a soon-to-be-added pound puppy. His wife is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at UConn.

Prof. Cosgel named department head

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Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), has announced that Prof. Metin Cosgel has been named head of the department of Economics, starting July 1, 2010. He says:

Professor Cosgel has been a member of the CLAS faculty since Fall of 1989. He has written extensively on the political economy of religion and has an ongoing project to study the economic history of the Ottoman Empire. In 2007, he received the Barkan Article Prize for the best article in the field of Ottoman and Turkish Studies awarded by the Turkish Studies Association. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal “Economic History of Developing Regions” and is a CLAS representative to the Provost’s International Executive Council.

Professor Couch Associate Editor of Journal of Income Distribution

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Professor Kenneth Couch recently joined the Journal of Income Distribution as an Associate Editor. The Journal of Income Distribution has an international readership and is based in Canada. The purpose of the Journal of Income Distribution is to foster scholarly research internationally into all aspects of income distribution. The Journal supports theoretical, empirical, and technical studies pertaining to income distribution research and its methodologies. The editorial board of the journal includes leading scholars in the area of income distribution. Professor Couch also serves as an Editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Prof. Furtado publishes in AER P&P

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In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Prof. Delia Furtado and coauthor, Heinrich Hock (Mathematica Policy Research), explore the role of immigration in explaining the labor supply and fertility decisions of high-education U.S. native women. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that low-skilled immigration decreases the price of childcare services, making it easier for career-minded women to combine work and family. The authors find that large inflows of immigrants to a city attenuate the negative relationship between female labor force participation and fertility, which translates into an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home.

Relative to women in most other developed countries, American women have very high rates of labor force participation and fertility. This is especially remarkable given how many countries have family leave and subsidy policies that are far more generous than those in the United States. The results in this paper point to immigration as a partial explanation for this phenomenon. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skill native women. Prof. Furtado plans to continue this line of research in future work.

Each May, the AER Papers and Proceedings publishes a sampling of the papers presented at the Annual Meeting of American Economics Association. A working paper version of the article is available here.

Shadow economies under the volcano ash cloud

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PhD student Catalina Granda-Carvajal (advisor, prof. Zimmermann) has been invited to present last week in an international workshop in Germany, “Shadow Economy, Tax Policy and Labor Markets in International Comparison: Options for Economic Policy“. This workshop was held at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, with the aim to demonstrate advances in the analysis of shadow economic activity and discuss how these can be used for better economic policies. Granda’s paper, entitled “The Unofficial Economy and the Business Cycle: A Test for Theories”, uses official data to establish a set of business cycle features and study how they vary across countries with the size of the unofficial sector, and compares these empirical regularities with the predictions of existing theories on macroeconomic fluctuations in economies featuring underground activities.

After having the chance to exchange ideas with young scholars and with some of the world experts in the field, Granda has been faced with the uncertainty imposed by the volcanic ash cloud in Iceland. Being stuck in Berlin has not been an easy situation; however, she reports “I have spent some time sightseeing, visiting museums and, overall, taking advantage of such a ‘forced tourism’. With plenty of history while trying to stand as a leader in arts and promoting Western values, now I understand why this city is one of the most exciting places in Europe. All in all, I cannot complain, but I cannot wait for the flight back to Storrs to share with my friends and colleagues how this experience has enriched my life and view of things.”

Boot Camp Economics

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How did you spend your winter break? For most students it did not include more course work! But for 1,152 UConn students it was an opportunity to take an intensive two-week Winter Intersession course. Five of the 55 Winter 2010 classes offered at the Storrs campus were online courses. Classes began December 28, 2009 and ended January 15, 2010–only 19 calendar days for a course that usually spans a 15-week semester. One of the online courses was Econ 1201, Principles of Microeconomics, taught by Prof. Oskar Harmon. Students taking the course signed up for 16 days of online lectures, homework, and exams, with two days off for New Year’s Eve and Day, and one day to prepare for a proctored cumulative 2-hour final exam.

Some students apparently had second thoughts about spending their entire winter break immersed in economics: only 30 of the 45 students who initially signed up for the course remained enrolled when the class began. Two of the four course exams were proctored. Most students sat for the proctored exams in the Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE) building at Storrs, but some took the exams at other campuses (UConn-Stamford, University of Rochester, and University of Maryland).

Twenty-seven students completed the course, and the average score on the cumulative final exam differed by only one point from the average final exam score in the same course taught by Professor Harmon in the regular Fall 2009 term. Students in the two courses had similar self-reported GPAs and a similar distribution of majors, but students in the winter course typically were closer to graduation: about 40% were seniors compared to only about 20% in the fall course. Also a much larger percentage of students were not working during the winter course (45%) than during the fall course (20%). In an exit poll, students were asked: “Knowing what you know now, would you recommend a similar intensive online course to a friend?” and “Can you describe the experience of taking a 16-week course in a 2-week term?” About 25% of the respondents would definitely take a similar course and consistently described the experience as “intense, but a good use of my time.” About 50% would possibly recommend this intersession course to a friend. Their descriptions of the experience ranged from: “Really hard; if you are not fully committed to this course you will not do well,” to “Very, very challenging. I put so much effort into doing well in the course and I was still struggling. A lot of information to tackle in 2 weeks.” And 25% would likely or definitely not recommend the course to a friend, describing the experience as: “Not recommended, too compressed,” and “Econ is much too hard to learn over the Internet.”

An email from a student who completed the 2-week micro course and is now taking the companion 16-week macro course describes the experience as an “immersion” and notes that: “I feel like I’m slacking when I don’t pick up a macro book everyday, because my mindset from micro was all day every day.”