Prof. Tripathi has been appointed as an associate editor of Econometric Theory (ET) for a four-year term starting January 1, 2010. ET is a leading field journal committed to publishing original contributions in econometrics. It is published by the Cambridge University Press and archived at JSTOR.
Faculty
Prof. Matschke publishes in JEEM
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Two faculty named CESifo Fellows
Prof. Matschke and Prof. Zimmermann have recently been named Fellows of the CESifo Institute in Munich. The CESifo Research Network brings together leading economists from around the globe and constitutes an ideal platform for the discussion of current applied and theoretical themes in economics, with an emphasis on public policy issues. The research network offers a wide range of network activities and functions as both a research tool and a publication platform for its members.
CESifo Fellows are internationally renowned economists who, after a research stay at CES or Ifo, have been invited to join the CESifo Research Network. Fellows may attend any CESifo-organised conference of their choosing, receive all CESifo publications, and benefit from additional CESifo services. Some Fellows further contribute to the network activities by organising conferences, acting as Coordinator for a given Network Research Area, becoming a member of the European Economic Advisory Group at CESifo, or a research professor at the Ifo Institute.
This brings the number of CESifo Fellow at the department to three, as Prof. Tripathi already is holding this honor.
Vicki Knoblauch publishes on preferences and collective choice
Prof. Knoblauch (IDEAS) has had a lot of success recently in publishing articles in economic theory. She has been working in two main areas. One is concerned with increasing our understanding of consumer and voter preferences. “Recognizing One-Dimensional Euclidean Preferences,” forthcoming in the Journal of Mathematical Economics, shows how to determine whether voters’ preferences over candidates were formed on the basis of a single issue when the preferences themselves are the only information available. “Binary Relations: Finite Characterizations and Computational Complexity,” published in Theory and Decision, defines a category of easy-to-implement techniques for studying consumer preferences.
Her other area of study concerns the design of mechanisms that combine individual preferences into a collective choice. “Three-Agent Peer Evaluations,” forthcoming in Economics Letters, is an investigation into the recent surprising discovery that no rule that divides a profit fairly among three partners based on reports they submit can respect those reports when they agree. “Marriage Matching and Gender Satisfaction,” published in Social Choice and Welfare, is, among a vast literature on the subject of marriage matching, one of only a handful that has made progress in determining men’s and women’s satisfaction with the outcome of the best-known matching algorithm.
Prof. Zimmermann encourages blogging on economic research
Blogs have become a popular medium to discuss all sorts of things, and this blog is an example of that. With the predicted decline of academic journals, new models of disseminating and discussing research are explored, and blogs could be one of them. In economics, however, most blogs are discussing current events and are rather politicized. Those that discuss research are few and unknown. To promote them, Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS) has created a year ago a blog aggregator devoted to economic research, Econ Academics. The future will tell whether research blogs will be successful.