On July 1 and 2, the Department of Economics hosted the annual New England Experimentalist Workshop.
The Workshop brought together experimental and behavioral economists from twelve universities to present research on topics as diverse as gender pay disparities, self-censorship of political views in the classroom, and effective environmental policy.
The two-day workshop was organized by faculty members Remy Levin and Mike Shor and graduate student Anastassiya Karaban.
The Department of Economics successfully held its first Graduate Assistant (GA) Orientation on January 16, 2023. The GA Orientation was coordinated and led by Professor Tianxu Chen. The event has been designed to support our GAs/TAs and student Instructors by providing them with strategies and tools to successfully start and manage their teaching responsibilities. It also aims to help promote their professional development in teaching.
The orientation invited David Des Armier from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) to share information about how to design a HuskyCT course webpage, as well as to familiarize GAs with University policies and CETL resources. During the orientation, Professor Talia Bar, Professor Tianxu Chen, Professor Mike Shor and Professor David Simon also shared their teaching experience with the GAs, and provided advice on a wide range of topics including lecture preparation, academic integrity, class engagement, and ensuring an accessible environment for students with disabilities.
The GA orientation had a great turnout. Over a dozen of PhD students from different cohorts attended the event, and we expect it to be held regularly in the future.
While the department is not able to celebrate with an awards banquet this year, we still are able to recognize the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty!
This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Shuo Han
Samuel Jackson
Tamara Shelley
Grace Smith
Khoa Tran
Yinuo Xiang
Ziyun Zhou
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Nidhi Nair
SeSe Nguyen
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Nadine Fernando
Prasad Gosavi
Pin Lyi
Choyang Wang
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Adem Aksoy
Allen Cazeau
Jeremy Salyer
Benjamin Scudder
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Erin McKeehan
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Shuyi Bian
Charles Triano Scholarship
John Doran
Beatrix Jordan
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Erik Choi
Ryan Durrel
Gregory Elmokian
Kevin Gabree
Prabhas KC
Joshua Waxman
Justin Wu
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Annaliesa Wood
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Cole Ensinger
Jordan Leonardi
Graduate Awards
W. Harrison Carter Award
Ruohan Huang
Ziyun Wu
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Lindsey Buck
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Matthew Brown
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Kunze Li
Lulin Li
Ghania Shuaib
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Economics Department General Scholarship
Anastassiya Karaban
Best Third Year Paper Award
Jiaqi Wang
Graduate School Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Sirui Qiu
Zhengxuan Wu
Heshan Zhang
CLAS Summer Fellowship
Erdal Asker
Matthew Brown
Jingyun Chen
Jinsoon Cho
Zhenhao Gong
Shangyue Jiang
Keuncheol Lee
Lulin Li
Yizhi Zhu
Faculty Awards
Grillo Family Research Award
Grillo Family Teaching Award
Congratulations to everyone!
Professors Jorge Agüero and Mike Shor have been awarded a grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for Research Funding in Academic Themes.
Funding is awarded to “individuals who are conducting research at a novel intersection of disciplines or to groups of faculty members working together to advance research stemming from a unique junction of their individual programs of scholarship.”
The project, titled “ ‘Résumé Overload’ and Heuristic Racism,” will use field experiments to examine whether job recruiters are more likely to employ implicit biases when selecting among an overwhelming number of job applicants than when facing a small, manageable number of applicants.
Professor Shor’s article, Optimizing Choice Architectures, was one of three finalists for the 2019 Decision Analysis Special Recognition Award, awarded annually to the best paper published in the journal, Decision Analysis, in the previous year.
The paper (coauthored with Tibor Besedes, Sudipta Sarangi, Cary Deck, and former UConn PhD student Mark Schneider) examines numerous ways to improve decision making from a large set of options. Different methods work for different people, and the paper identifies the source of this heterogeneity.
The Early College Experience Economics program (https://ece.uconn.edu/) held its annual workshop this fall for 30 Connecticut high school economics teachers who are teaching UConn’s Principles of Microeconomics (ECON 1201), Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 1202) and/or Essentials of Economics (ECON 1000).
Leading off the workshop was Professor Mike Shor, presenting “Patent Holdup” in which he explained the limits monopoly power conveyed by patents. The complementary relationships among patents and the price determination of purchasing or licensing of patents. He went on to explain the idea of the patent hold up. He also provided the workshop participants with a classroom exercise in which students discover how patents are priced.
There followed a presentation by Professor Natalia Smirnova, “Using Data in the Classroom: FRED database.” Professor Smirnova demonstrated several empirical uses of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s FRED database including both Macro and Micro economic examples.
Professor William Alpert presented a lunch time talk about the “Perils and Pitfalls of Prediction” highlighting the famine predictions of Paul Ehrlich for the 1980 (100’s of millions die) and the failed predictions of The Club of Rome from 1973. Professor Alpert also “predicted” the rise to more than 600 million in the number of horses in the United States if 18th Century trends had continued, assuming no alternative means of transportation.
Professor Steven Lanza then followed up with a presentation entitled “Rediscovering Lost Arts: Economic Index Numbers” in which he stressed the importance of index numbers and the biases in those numbers. He also demonstrated how to calculate them using data that is easy to access and readily available.
Professor Nishith Prakash rendered the concluding presentation concerning a natural experiment concerning the harassment. In India 79% of women living in cities have experienced harassment in public spaces. Professor Prakash and his coauthors set out to determine the effect of street patrolling that targets harassment, on the type and frequency of incidents and women’s proactive responses. They also are trying to determine the impacts of targeting perpetrators of harassment and what drives these changes — visibility, and/or quantity of a focused taskforce?
All of the presentations were well received and the workshop was among the most successful offered by the ECE Economics program.
The Allais Paradox is one of the most enduring violations of expected utility theory, a hallmark theory of economics. Professor Mike Shor and coauthor Mark Schneider (a recent UConn PhD) have had their paper “The Common Ratio Effect in Choice, Pricing, and Happiness Tasks” accepted by the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
In the paper, Professor Shor elicits preferences for the Allais paradox choice alternatives using three different methods: traditional choice, monetary valuation, and subjective happiness ratings. He finds that both the consistency and distribution of responses differs systematically across different elicitation methods, with modal choices replicating the Allais preference pattern, modal happiness ratings exhibiting consistent risk aversion, and modal valuations maximizing expected value. The paper finds support for a dual process framework in which people use either a “logical” or an “intuitive” thinking process depending on the task.
In a recent workshop for nineteen University of Connecticut Early College Experience Instructors, Professors Mike Shor, Steve Lanza, Delia Furtado and Bill Alpert presented the principles instructors with current economic thinking concerning game theory, the law and economics, effects of immigration on the domestic labor market, and monetary/macroeconomics for principles level students.
The Early College Experience (ECE) program is a concurrent enrollment program that allows motivated high school students to take UConn courses at their high schools for both high school and college credit. Every course taken through UConn ECE is equivalent to the same course at the University of Connecticut. Students benefit by taking college courses in a setting that is both familiar and conducive to learning. High school instructors who have been certified through the University of Connecticut serve as adjunct faculty members and teach UConn ECE courses.
Established in 1955, UConn Early College Experience is the nation’s longest running concurrent enrollment program and is accredited by The National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships. In the last decade, the Economics Program has grown from two instructors in two Connecticut high schools to almost 40 instructors in 30 Connecticut high schools offering the Principles of Economics classes and Economics 1000.
For more information see: http://ece.uconn.edu/
Professor Shor spoke to an audience of 100 CEOs and corporate presidents last week as part of the YPO-WPO Passion For Learning Day in Princeton, NJ.
The Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) – World Presidents’ Organization (WPO) is an international organization for heads of large corporations to network and learn.
The event featured three speakers – Professor Shor joined two professors from the Harvard Business School – who each led a two-hour educational session.
Professor Shor spoke about the practical uses of game theory in business.
The Provost’s office at the University of Connecticut regularly recognizes faculty members with excellent teaching evaluations commending them as achieving “excellence in teaching”.
A number of faculty members in the economics department have received this recognition in the past year: Professors Talia Bar, Ken Couch, Delia Furtado, Paul Hallwood, Olivier Morand, Susan Randolph, Kathy Segerson, Mikhael Shor, Owen Svalestad, and Jackie Zhao.
Congratulations to these economics faculty for their important contributions to the educational mission of UConn!