Faculty

Prof. Zimmermann to speak at British Library event

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Prof. Christian Zimmermann is to speak at the end of the week at a conference at the British Library in London on subject repositories. These are collections or works and research, like the DigitalCommons at the University of Connecticut, but for subjects instead of institutions. The two prime examples of subject repositories are arXiv for Physics and RePEc for Economics. Prof. Zimmermann will talk about the latter, in particular how it came to grow with very little resources.

The conference will in particular feature the official launch of a new online service for Economists, the Nereus lead EconomistOnline portal, which at this point relies heavily on data from RePEc. Prof. Zimmermann will conclude his European trip by giving further talks at the German universities of Cologne, Dortmund, Giessen and Darmstadt.

Department 16th in “blog reputation ranking”

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According to a recent article in the Eastern Economic Journal, our department ranks 16th by reputation of their blogging faculty. The authors took a selection of the 85 most important economics blogs, then looked at the academic citation frequency of their regulator contributors. Prof. Richard Langlois, who regularly posts on Organizations and Markets ranks 9th by academic impact, and all by himself brings the department to a ranking of 16th. A possibly better ranking could have been in the cards if any of the blogs Prof. Christian Zimmermann contributes to had been included in the analysis: Against Monopoly, the RePEc blog and the NEP-DGE blog.

Prof. Segerson wins Publication of Enduring Quality Award

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At the recent Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) meeting in Atlanta, GA, Professor Kathy Segerson was awarded the 2009 Publication of Enduring Quality Award by the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). This award, instituted in 1989, is given annually to the author(s) of a publication that is deemed to have had a lasting and significant impact on the field of environmental and natural resource economics. Professor Segerson received the award for her paper entitled “Uncertainty and Incentives for Nonpoint Pollution Control,” which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 1988. During the award ceremony, the presenter of the award noted that “Dr. Segerson’s paper was the first to incorporate the fundamental characteristics of nonpoint source pollution into a formal theoretical model to study efficient tax schemes.” This paper proposed an innovative policy approach to controlling agricultural production based on observations of ambient water quality, which some have termed the “Segerson mechanism”. In recent years, it is spawned a number of studies that have examined the incentives created by this mechanism and related ambient-based policies using economic laboratory experiments.

CLAS faculty snapshot features Prof. Segerson

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Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), has worked as an environmental economist for 25 years. She is an elected fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and is known for developing the Segerson mechanism, a policy for rewarding or penalizing farmers as a group for their agricultural pollution runoff. She is a science advisory board member for the Environmental Protection Agency and vice chairs a committee on how to value the impact of EPA rules on ecosystems.

Listen to the podcast of this snapshot.

Recent graduate works on the economics of obesity

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Marina-Selini Katsaiti has recently completed her graduate studies at the Department of Economics of the University of Connecticut. Her PhD thesis, “Three Essays on the Economics of Obesity,” focused on different aspects relating to the economics of obesity (happiness, macroeconomic issues, health care costs). Selini defended her thesis in September 2009 under the significant and very valuable assistance and support of her advisor, Prof. Zimmermann, and associate advisors, Prof. Heffley and Prof. Randolph. Pieces of her thesis were presented in many international economics conferences and a section has been published in a book. In addition, an article outside her thesis, “Corruption and Growth Under Weak Identification,” co-authored with fellow graduates Philip Shaw and Marius Jurgilas has been accepted for publication by Economic Inquiry.

Selini is currently working as a researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), in the Department of Economics. In addition, she is working as an independent researcher for the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a think tank in Belgium. Her research topics of interest include: economic growth, behavioral economics, corruption, trust and risk issues, and health economics.

Prof. Randolph works with UN Human Rights Commission

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The Right to Development, as established by the UN General Assembly in the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, enjoys growing international support. However the normative content of the right, though often referred to in international fora, has remained relatively opaque, and there has been concomitant difficulty for Member States and other actors both in determining the duties inherent in the right and in assessing whether or not those duties are being met at national and international levels.

Prof. Randolph has been commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to assist the High Level Task Force of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development in addressing that difficulty, and in particular in devising criteria to assess the implementation of the right. Working together with Maria Green, a lawyer specializing in Human Rights, her mandate is threefold: first, to establish a well-defined set of contours for the Right to Development to aid in effective operationalization and assessment; second, to devise a methodology for determining criteria, sub-criteria and indicators for use in
assessing implementation of the right; and third, to propose specific criteria, sub-criteria and indicators that might eventually be used as a basis for guidelines or a legal instrument on the right. The mandate additionally requires that the specific indicators proposed respond to the priority concerns of the international community as identified by the Working Group on the Right to Development including and going beyond those enumerated in Millennium Development Goal 8.

Daniel Landau’s Retirement

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Professor Daniel Landau has announced that he will be retiring from the Department of Economics at the University of Connecticut’s Waterbury Campus on January 1, 2010 after twenty eight and half years of service at the University of Connecticut. Dan joined the Department as an Assistant Professor in 1981 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989. Dan toiled alone as the lone economist at the Waterbury Campus. Although sequestered at there, Dan was a frequent participant in Department seminars and meetings at the University’s Storrs campus during his early years with the University.

Dan began his education with a B.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and received his doctoral degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1974. Following his graduation, Dan accepted an Assistant Professorship at Haifa University in Israel where he served until 1979. The following two years saw Dan serve as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Connecticut in 1981. From 1982 to 1985, Dan was also a Visiting Research Associate in Yale University’s Economic Growth Center.

During his career, Dan was a productive researcher who left his mark on the profession. He published five books and monographs during years from 1974 to 2009. He was also the author of 20 professional journal articles. His articles appeared in such journals as Economic Development & Cultural Change, Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, World Development, Public Choice and History of Political Economy. Dan was also the author or coauthor of three technical Reports.

Dan will be missed by the Department and thousands of students who benefited from his knowledge during his tenure with the University of Connecticut at Waterbury. The Department wishes him good health, pleasant times and fond memories during his retirement from the University.

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.