The volume entitled, The State of Economic and Social Human Rights: A Global Overview, edited by Lanse Minkler, has been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press and will be available in December 2012.  It offers original scholarship on economic and social human rights from leading and new cutting-edge scholars in the fields of economics (including Susan Randolph from our department), law, political science, sociology and anthropology. It analyzes the core economic and social rights, the crucial topic of non-discrimination, and includes an innovative section on “meta” rights. The main chapters answer important questions about economic and social rights performance around the world by emphasizing the obstacles that prevent governments from fulfilling their obligations.  Novel topics include: discrimination of the stateless, Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and new data on the widespread legalization of social security and environmental rights. The book¹s introductory and concluding chapters address conceptual issues, and correct mistakes often made by critics of economic and social rights.

Shalini Mitra recently defended her PhD dissertation titled, “Essays on the Volatility of Borrowing Constrained Economies” under the supervision of Professor Christian Zimmermann. 

Her dissertation tries to explain using different channels the increasing firm level volatility even in the presence of lower and decreasing aggregate volatility as seen during the period of the Great Moderation. She specifically looks at financial development and organization specific capital in explaining recent trends in aggregate and firm level volatilities. She also studies the role of an informal sector, which is relatively more borrowing constrained, on the macroeconomy. Her findings suggest that financial development as well as firm specific investments are associated with higher and increasing volatility at the firm level and non-increasing volatility at the aggregate with the divergence being more pronounced in the later case. She also finds that a more borrowing constrained informal sector has little effect on economic volatility.

Shalini starts her tenure-track position on February 1, 2012 and is relocating to Liverpool, England.

Today (Friday, May 20) the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis released its quarterly OUTLOOK, a forecast of Connecticut’s output and employment for the next ten quarters.  “Bucking Stiff Headwinds” is modestly more optimistic, but notes the array of downside risks for the state’s economy, everything from the ending of $6.3 billion in stimulus over the last two years to the anemic national recovery, European sovereign debt turmoil, and the difficulty of capturing jobs in the face of a globalized economy.

The CCEA Outllook: Bucking Stiff Headwinds, is available at http://ccea.uconn.edu/forecasts/CTOutlook_2011May.pdf

CCEA is directed by Prof. Fred Carstensen, and currently engages five graduate students in its studies.