Faculty

Research by Prof Couch discussed in WSJ and on CNN

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Recent research by Prof. Kenneth Couch, previously presented on this blog has been featured today in an article of the Wall Street Journal. This work, written with Nicholas Jolly (MA, PhD) and Dana Placzek, shows that workers who have lost their jobs in mass layoffs suffer from significant wage losses in subsequent jobs, losses that can persist for years. The immediate drop amounts to 18% on average in a recession, leading to significant reductions in household welfare.

This story has subsequently been picked up by CNN.

UConn Ph.D. Serves as World Bank’s Lead Economist in Russia

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Zeljko Bogetic, one of Professor Dennis Heffley’s former Ph.D. students, currently is serving as Lead Economist and Country Sector Coordinator for Russia in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. A native of Montegro, Zeljko completed his dissertation (A Computable General Equilibrium Model of the Yugoslav Economy) in 1990. Soon thereafter, he entered the World Bank’s prestigious Young Professionals Program.

Zeljko has held a number of positions during his 20-year career at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Prior to his present assignment in Moscow, he served as a lead economist in the Africa Region of the World Bank, with primary responsibilities for Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and before that he served as lead economist for South Africa and the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) cluster leader for Southern Africa Customs Union countries at the World Bank. Zeljko’s command of five languages—Serbo-Croatian, English, French, Russian, and Spanish—has clearly been put to good use over the years.

In addition to his administrative duties, Zeljko has published books, scholarly articles, and papers on a variety of subjects: public finance reforms in transition economies; tax and expenditure policies; fiscal federalism; macroeconomic stabilization; dollarization and currency boards; infrastructure, productivity, and growth; and benchmarking of infrastructure performance. In addition to co-editing one the World Bank’s early volumes on transition economies (Financing Government in the Transition, 1995), he has published articles in the Journal of Comparative Economics, Challenge, the Cato Journal, World Development, Central Banking, Contemporary Economic Policy, South African Journal of Economics, Finance & Development, and Journal of Development Perspectives, as well as a number of papers in the World Bank’s Research Working Paper Series. Zeljko also leads a team of researchers that produce the World Bank’s Russian Economic Report, a prime source of information on recent macroeconomic conditions and policy developments in Russia.

Alumnus Profile: Donald Vandegrift

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Economics, like most disciplines, has become highly specialized, so it is not surprising that many economists focus their research on a narrow range of topics or issues. Not so for one of our Ph.D. alumni, Donald Vandegrift (IDEAS).

Don completed his doctorate in 1993 under the tutelage of Prof. Richard Langlois. Apparently Dick’s interest in a wide range of topics in the field of industrial organization rubbed off on Don, who currently serves as Chair of the Department of Economics in the School of Business at The College of New Jersey.

Over the years, Don has published papers on performance excuse under contracts (European Journal of Law and Economics, 1997), asset specificity (Eastern Economic Journal, 1998), energy use (Journal of Energy and Development, 1999), product warranty (Contemporary Economic Policy, 2001), risky strategies in “tournament competition” (Labour Economics, 2003), obesity rates (Health & Place, 2004), gender differences in competitive strategies (Journal of Socio-Economics, 2005), prescription drug spending (Southern Economic Journal, 2006), incentive effects in experimental settings (Experimental Economics, 2007), and hedge fund performance (Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds, 2009).

Don’s forthcoming work continues to reflect his exceptional versatility. A paper on hedge fund performance will soon appear in the Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds; his experimental analysis of differences in competitive behavior between men and women is slated for publication by the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; a study of sabotage in tournaments has been accepted by the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics; and the Annals of Regional Science will publish a paper on linkages between open space, house prices, and the local property tax base.

It is great to see our former students enjoying their work and sharing it with others. Don spoke at our on-campus 2008 Economics Reunion and Forum, and we are hoping that he will be back in Storrs next spring, when we repeat this successful event. Don and other former grad students presented research papers, participated in job-experience panels, met our current students and newer faculty, and reconnected with old friends and fellow alums. We will be posting plans for the next event, but it is clear that even in his current administrative role as Department Chair, Don has continued his lively line(s) of research and will have little problem coming up with a new paper for the 2010 reunion.

Prof. Matschke publishes in JEEM

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Prof. Matschke recently got a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), the leading field journal in environmental economics. The paper, titled “Environmental Policy in Majoritarian Systems” (UConn Economics Working Paper 2008-01), is the outcome of an ongoing research project with Per Fredriksson (University of Louisville) and Jenny Minier (University of Kentucky) on the influence of majoritarian systems on economic policy.

This paper sheds new light on the determination of environmental tax policies in majoritarian federal electoral systems such as the U.S., and derives implications for the environmental federalism debate on whether the national or local government should have authority over environmental taxes. In the absence of majority bias, the socially preferred policy would be federal district-level taxation which accounts both for cross-boundary pollution and differences in industry concentration across districts. If majority representatives use environmental tax policy to maximize the welfare of only their own districts rather than social welfare, federal district-level pollution taxes are typically suboptimal, and decentralized or federal uniform taxation may be the preferred solution.

Former MA and PhD Students: Hold These Dates

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In late March 2008, the Department hosted a Graduate Reunion and Forum at the Bishop Center. At the one-day reunion, some of our former PhD students presented their recent research, while others employed in the private sector or by government described their work in professional experience panels. That evening, we also held the Department’s annual awards banquet. We are planning to host a similar event on Friday, April 2, 2010.

Also, the day before the reunion (April 1), we will be holding the “Philip E. Austin Forum on Economics and Public Policy.” Professor Segerson is organizing this event, and funding it using part of the endowment funds for the Austin Chair. The speaker for the forum will be Harvard University environmental economist Robert Stavins. He will speak on climate change in a Post-Kyoto era. President Emeritus Austin, Provost Nicholls, and Dean Teitelbaum are all planning to attend this event.

We will have more details about both events, but for now we hope you will keep the two dates open and plan to attend. See you in April!

Adjunct professor to talk at University of Wisconsin about experience in Cambodia

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Dr. Benny Widyono, adjunct professor of Economics on the Stamford campus, will speak on October 16 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about his recent book, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. This books recreates his experience in Cambodia while being a member of the UN transitional authority and then as a personal envoy to the UN secretary-general after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. He describes the fierce battles for power centering on King Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The talk will focus on the premise of the book, that Cambodia had, during the cold war, due to its geopolitical location, experienced enormous chaos, turmoil, civil war and deep despair in the ongoing power struggle for hegemony in Southeast Asia. Thus, when the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime was ousted by Vietnamese troops on January 7 1979, diplomatic maneuverings in the United Nations in New York continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge regime as the legitimate government of Cambodia for another 11 years culminating in Paris Peace Agreements which were themselves flawed. These past unjust decisions continued to haunt Cambodia long after the Khmer Rouge was ousted and sent to the jungles near Thailand.

Prof. Langlois gives endowed lecture at Union College

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On October 1, 2009, Professor Richard Langlois spoke at Union College in Schenectady, New York, on the topic: “Creative Destruction: The Work of Joseph Schumpeter in his Day and Ours.” Jointly sponsored by the Engineering program and the Department of Economics at Union, the talk was supported by a donation from a college alumnus who wanted students and faculty to become more familiar with the work of Schumpeter, a Vienna-trained Harvard economist of the early twentieth century who stressed the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation in economic growth and insisted on the dynamic and often unstable nature of capitalism. As recently noted in this blog, Professor Langlois is the author of a 2007 book on the work of Schumpeter.

Economic Rights Panels at Upcoming Human Rights in the USA Conference

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Human Rights in the USA is an international three-day conference from October 22 to 24 that takes place at both the Storrs and Law School campuses. Three Economic Rights panels will explore issues surrounding the right to an adequate standard of living (details follow). The entire UConn community is invited to attend the conference and to learn about the state of the art research in human rights and economic rights.

Friday, October 23, 2009, UConn Law School, Hartford

Economic Rights and Poverty
Chair: Shareen Hertel, University of Connecticut.
Discussants: Ken Neubeck, University of Connecticut Emeritus, and Susan Randolph, University of Connecticut

  • Catherine Albisa, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. “Drawing Lines in the Sand: The Development of New Rights Norms in the United States.”
  • Philip Harvey, Rutgers University School of Law, Camden. “A Rights-Based Anti-Recession Strategy: What American Progressives Learned from the New Deal and then Forgot.”
  • Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Wilfred Laurier University. “The Yellow Sweatshirt: Human Dignity and Economic Human Rights in Advanced Industrial Democracies.”
  • Gillian MacNaughton, University of Oxford. “A Holistic Human Rights Perspective on Poverty.”

Saturday, October 24, 2009. University of Connecticut, Storrs Campus, Rome Ballroom

Katrina through an Economic Rights Lens
Chair: Evelyn Simien, University of Connecticut
Discussants: Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, The New School and Heather Turcotte, University of Connecticut

  • Davida Finger, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, Rachel Luft, University of New Orleans “Post Hurricane Katrina Evacuation and Housing Policy: A Human Rights and Social Movements’ Analysis.”
  • Hope Lewis, Northeastern University School of Law. “Transnationalism and Human Rights in the U.S.: Notes from the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora.”
  • Kristen Lewis, Social Science Research Council, American Human DevelopmentProject. “A Portrait of Louisiana: Louisiana Human Development Report 2009.”

Researching Economic Rights in the USA
Chair: David Richards, University of Memphis
Discussants: David Richards, University of Memphis and Lyle Scruggs, University of Connecticut

  • David Cingranelli, SUNY-Binghamton. “Measuring and Explaining the Gap between ILO Standards and US Labor Policies.”
    Patrick Heidkamp, Southern Connecticut State University. “Measuring Economic Rights in the USA: A Spatial Analytic Perspective.”
  • Lanse Minkler, University of Connecticut. “On the Cost of Economic Rights in the US.”
  • Susan Randolph, University of Connecticut. “Economic Rights in the Land of Plenty: Monitoring State Fulfillment of Economic & Social Rights Obligations in the United States.”

For more information about Human Rights in the USA go to the conference website.

Prof. Zimmermann co-organizes conference on the Macroeconomics of Health

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Prof. Zimmermann is co-organizing a conference on the Macroeconomics of Health this week at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The study of health economics has traditionally been the realm of applied microeconomics. There is, however, an increasing awareness that health issues also have macroeconomic consequences. A prime example is the AIDS epidemic, which has fundamentally changed the labor market, as well as many other markets, in parts of Africa. Closer to home, the cost of health care is putting a new burden on governments and businesses; indeed, in his recent press conference, President Obama said that health care reform was at the forefront of economic and public policy. Also, demographic changes can change households’ saving behavior to a point of affecting capital accumulation and thus growth.

The conference seeks to build new synergies between macroeconomics and health economics, first by assembling the macroeconomists working on health issues, second by encouraging interaction with traditional health economists. The covered topics are broad, from the impact of tropical diseases on developing economies to health care reform in the United States.

For more details about the conference, see the UCSB Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance.