Professors Alpert, Lanza, Furtado, and Shor Present to Early College Experience Instructors

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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.

furtado-ece
Professor Furtado offers a well-received presentation concerning her own research on female immigrants and immigration issues generally in the United States today

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/

The First Biannual Austin Seminar in Education Policy

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Amy Ellen SchwartzProfessor Amy Ellen Schwartz, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Chair in Public Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, will present The Impact of Universal Free Meals on Student Outcomes as the speaker at the first biannual Austin Seminar in Education Policy.

The lecture, co-sponsored by the Center for Education Policy Analysis, the Neag School of Education, and the Department of Economics, and presented jointly with the Health, Labor and Development seminar series of the Department of Economics, will be held:

Tuesday, October 25th
3:00 – 4:30 pm
Gentry 142, 144

A reception will follow the seminar.

The Abstract:  This paper investigates the academic effects of providing school meals free of charge to all students.  Using detailed data on NYC public school students, we estimate the impact of  “Universal Free Meals” (UFM) on standardized test scores,  participation in school meals, obesity and BMI.

Using a difference in difference design and novel student-level transaction data, we explore the heterogeneity of the impact by student race/ethnicity, poverty, and, critically, prior participation in school lunch.  Most important, we find that UFM significantly increases academic performance of middle school students by as much as 0.1 sd, large enough to pass a commonly used threshold for a successful academic intervention.

UFM increases lunch participation by roughly 5.2 percentage points for poor students and larger effects of 13.5 percentage points for non-poor students.  Similarly, the effect of UFM is larger for students with low baseline participation, than those with high baseline participation.   Finally, we find some evidence of reductions in weight and obesity for non-poor students driven, perhaps, by the better nutritional value of school lunch compared to  competitive alternatives.

 

Professor Simon publishes in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

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Professor David Simon published his paper “Does Early Life Exposure to Cigarette Smoke Permanently Harm Childhood Welfare?  Evidence from Cigarette Tax Hikes” in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

Professor Simon used restricted use health survey data to link cigarette taxes to cohorts of children. This shows that in-utero exposure to a dollar increase in the state cigarette tax causes a 10% decrease in sick days from school and a 4.7% decrease in having two or more doctor visits.  Jointly these findings support the argument that exposure to cigarette smoke in utero carries significant medium-term costs, and that excise taxes can lead to lasting intergenerational improvements in wellbeing.

Professor Ken Couch Makes Presentation at U.S. Treasury

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Professor Ken Couch and his collaborator, Barbara Smith, of the Social Security Administration (SSA) gave a presentation along with a select group of researchers invited to appear at a one-day symposium at the U.S. Treasury in Washington, DC on Financial Security Research.  The research Couch and Smith presented focused on the impact of informational outreach by the SSA on retirement behavior in contrast to changes in the SSA retirement system itself.

Other presenters included faculty from Ohio State University, Penn, UCLA, USC, the University of Michigan and researchers from the Brookings Institution, the Upjohn Institute and the Employment Benefit Research Institute.  The Acting Commissioner of SSA was in attendance along with many Assistant and Deputy Commissioners and Secretaries of SSA and Treasury.

New Faculty Join Economics Department

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The Economics Department is happy to welcome four faculty who joined UConn at the beginning of the Fall Semester.  Chihwa (Duke) Kao, formerly at Syracuse University, joined the economics department as its new Department Head.  Kao is a renowned econometrician working on time series and panel data topics.

Jungbin Hwang also joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor this Fall after completing his Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego.  Hwang is also an econometrician working on panel data and time series topics.

Hyun Lee also joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.  Hyun is a macroeconomist who works on topics related to economic growth and policy analysis.

Patricia Ritter joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor following completion of her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.  Dr. Ritter works on topics at the intersection of development and health.

Welcome!

Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

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Professor Nishith Prakash’s project, ‘Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia’, has received generous funding from UBS-Optimus Foundation and World Bicycle Relief and will be in joint collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) at Yale University:

Many countries worldwide have made significant progress towards gender equality in education, labor force participation, and political representation in recent decades. However, in many developing and less developed countries, there also exist discriminatory social norms that favor early marriage and limit girl’s access to education and labor force participation. Therefore, it is not surprising that reducing gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education has been one of the most important goals for international education policy over the past decade, and has been enshrined as one of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s).

In this experimental study we aim to study the impact of providing cycles to girls in grade 7 and 8 on education and empowerment. The aim of this evaluation is to estimate the impact of World Bicycle Relief’s BEEP program in Zambia, which provides access to cycles to students who live far from schools in their communities. The study proposes to rigorously test the impact of cycle distribution on education outcomes as well as outcomes pertaining to girls’ empowerment and their bargaining position in the households.

This study will build on the previous study by Muralidharan and Prakash (2016) by testing if increased school access through cycles could create an enabling environment for girls to negotiate better health outcomes in addition to education outcomes. The study proposes to test the following hypotheses:

1)  What is the impact of providing cycles to adolescent girls on education outcomes such as attendance, drop outs and examination scores?

2)  What is the impact of providing cycles to adolescent girls on pregnancy, marriage, fertility, mobility, bargaining power, and empowerment?

https://sites.google.com/site/nishithprakash1978/field-projects

Harmon, Svalestad and Tomolonis present at CTREE 2016 Conference

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PCTREErofessors Oskar Harmon and Owen Svalestad, and Paul Tomolonis (PhD Candidate) participated in the Sixth Annual Conference on Teaching & Research in Economic Education, June 1 – 3, sponsored by the  American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education.

Oskar Harmon moderated the  panel session “The Experience of Managing a Team in the FED Challenge Competition: Pointers and Pitfalls”, and Owen Svalestad presented “The First Timer Experience”.

Oskar Harmon and Paul Tomolonis presented the paper “Can Social Media be an Effective Tool for Discussion in the Online Classroom?”.  The paper makes a comparison between the use of social media and traditional Course Management System (CMS) discussion groups in a fully online (Microeconomic Principles) course.  Using the experimental design of a randomized trial, the paper tests the popular hypothesis that students using social media (Facebook discussion group here) have greater engagement with the class and higher learning outcomes relative to students not using that platform for coursework (the CMS control group here) because of the ease of use and student familiarity with social media.  Our findings were contrary to this popular hypothesis with lower levels of engagement and learning outcomes for the Facebook groups compared to the CMS discussion groups. We attribute this to the more casual and less formal environment of social media compared to the CMS since students postings were shorter via the social media discussions.

Professor Ross’s Article in Vox

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An article by Professor Stephen Ross, co-authored with Stephen Billings and David Deming, has been posted on the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s policy portal, Vox:

Neighbourhood spillovers in youth crime: Social interactions matter

In the article, Professor Ross and his co-authors discuss recent research on the mechanisms behind the neighborhood concentration of crime.  They focus on their recent NBER and HCEO working paper, in which they show that social relationships at school play a very important role in mediating neighborhood effects in youth crime.

 

UConn Ranks High for Economics Departments in CT

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A recent report from Zippia featuring the best Economics departments in Connecticut ranks the University of Connecticut near the top of the list, just below Yale:

These Are The 10 Best Colleges For Economics Majors In Connecticut

The report reviewed a total of 103 institutions of higher learning in Connecticut, and considered Career Results (earnings for graduates), Economics Emphasis (majors as a percentage of a graduating class), and School Performance (admissions, graduation rates, and cost).