Professor Kenneth Couch has received a research grant from the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Couch will work with research staff at SSA to develop micro-simulation models that consider potential adjustments to the Social Security retirement benefit structure in response to increased longevity of Americans. A key concern is distributional equity of benefits for groups with shorter life expectancies and disproportionate rates of poverty.
Professor Paul Hallwood’s book Economics of the Oceans: Rights, Rents and Resources (Routledge, Oxford, 2014) will be translated into Chinese, for distribution in China. It will be the second of his books to have a Chinese edition.
Professor Jorge Agüero (faculty) and Juan Campanario (student) are the recipients of the 2016 Undergraduate Economics Research Award Program (ERAP).
Their work on their project “Can Growth and Redistribution Reduce the Influence of Colonial Institutions? The Case of Peru’s Mining Mita” will be supported through the ERAP program, which is designed to assist research apprenticeships and research collaborations between undergraduate economics majors and economics faculty members.
The ERAP program enables the student to enhance research skills relevant to the field of economics, while the faculty member guides the project and provides mentorship. Only one award is given each academic year, with the student receiving a $1,500 fellowship and the faculty mentor receiving a $1,000 grant added to their departmental research accounts.
Congratulations to the award winning team!
Professor Naknoi presented her paper titled “Tariffs and the Expansion of the American Pig Iron Industry, 1870-1940” in the International Economics Seminar at Vanderbilt University on April 8, 2016.
Her study examines the benefit of the protection of the American pig iron industry. She illustrates that the protection was critical for the industry before 1890.
Graduate students Andrew Ju and Sungoh Kwon have received the Department of Economics’ ‘Best Third-Year Paper’ awards for 2015-2016.
From the abstract of Andrew’s paper State Collective Bargaining Laws and Public-Private Sector Wage Differentials:
In recent years states across the country have considered restricting or eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees, thus sparking a national debate over the compensation of public sector workers. In this paper I contribute evidence to this debate by examining the effects of state collective bargaining laws on public-private sector wage differentials. Using data from the 2000 to 2014 CPS Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (MORG) and a variety of identification strategies, I find that in states without mandatory collective bargaining laws state and local government workers earn approximately 7 percent less than their private sector counterparts. In contrast, in states with mandatory collective bargaining laws, state and local government workers earn approximately the same as their private sector counterparts.
I also find that state collective bargaining laws play an important role in determining the level of fringe benefits: local government employees in mandatory collective bargaining states have significantly higher probabilities of obtaining an employer-sponsored health insurance or pension plan.
From the abstract of Sungoh’s paper Does Public School Spending Raise Intergenerational Mobility?: Evidence from U.S. School Finance Reforms:
This study prov
ides the first quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between public school spending and intergenerational mobility (IGM). Using a plausibly exogenous variation in school spending induced by U.S. court-mandated school finance reforms and county-by-cohort level measures of IGM, I found no evidence that the increase in public school spending raises future income rank of disadvantaged children in the national distribution, while there is evidence of a slight increase in the rank of advantaged children. When it comes to college attendance, I found that children similarly benefit from additional school spending regardless of family backgrounds. I discuss some possible explanations on the results.
Congratulations, Andrew and Sungoh!
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!
Professor Ross’s work with Pat Bayer and Fernando Ferreira has been featured in The Atlantic and the Pacific Standard
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/blacks-hispanics-mortgages/471024/
https://psmag.com/predatory-lending-is-another-form-of-american-housing-discrimination
This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004-2007. Even after controlling for credit score and other key risk factors, African-American and Hispanic home buyers are 105 and 78 percent more likely to have high cost mortgages for home purchases.
The increased incidence of high cost mortgages is attributable both to sorting across lenders (60-65 percent) and to differential treatment of equally qualified borrowers by lenders (35-40 percent). The vast majority of the racial and ethnic differences across lenders can be explained by a single measure of the lender’s foreclosure risk, and most of the within-lender differences are concentrated at high-risk lenders.
Thus, differential exposure to high-risk lenders combined with the differential treatment by these lenders explains almost all of the racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage borrowing.
Professors Oskar Harmon and Steven Lanza presented a paper “Factors Contributing to Differences in State Economic Outcomes over the Great Recession” at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Eastern Economic Association in Washington DC, Feb 26, 2016.
The paper employs a Cox Proportional Hazard model to analyze duration of state recession and recovery spells during the Great Recession.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Early College Experience (ECE) program at the University of Connecticut.
ECE 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. High school instructors who have been certified through the University of Connecticut serve as adjunct faculty members and teach UConn ECE courses.
Since about 29% of UConn ECE students continue on to the University of Connecticut, the Research & Development team is able to track their progress. UConn ECE students are more likely to graduate on time and to hold higher first and second semester GPA’s than those students who did not participate in the program.
The Department of Economics has participated in the ECE program since the early 1990s with a small number of instructors (two in 2006). Today that number has grown to 35 certified Economics instructors offering all of the principals classes to students in 25 high schools across the state. The Economics ECE coordinator is Professor William Alpert.
Huanan Xu, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics, has accepted a tenure track faculty position in the Judd Leighton School of Business and Economics at Indiana University South Bend.
The Leighton School offers M.B.A. degrees as well as other Masters level programs. IU South Bend has an enrollment of roughly 7,000 undergraduate and 550 graduate students.
Huanan’s thesis committee consists of Ken Couch (Chair), Delia Furtado, and Rob Fairlie (Cal-Santa Cruz).