The UConn Economics Department was well represented by faculty and graduate students attending the annual Conference of the Southern Economics Association held in New Orleans at the beginning of the Thanksgiving break. Those in attendance included Jorge Agüero, Ken Couch, David Simon, William Alpert, Matt Ross, Tao Song, Ling Huang, and Oskar Harmon.
Professor Mike Shor participates in Science Salon on Climate Change
Last Thursday, eighty Hartford-area residents met at NIXS in Hartford for cocktails and a discussion of climate change, part of UConn’s ongoing Science Salon series.
Professor Shor discussed his latest research about how people process (and ignore) scientific evidence in favor of preconceived notions. One audience member (failing to appreciate the irony) told the entire panel of scientists that he does not believe a word of what they are saying but their “so called facts” conflict with his prior view.
Background:
For the first Science Salon (including Dick Langlois): http://econ.uconn.edu/2015/06/08/professor-langlois-at-uconns-first-science-salon/
Professors Alpert and Shor Present an Early College Experience Workshop
On October 30 Professors Wi
lliam Alpert and Mikhael Shor presented a workshop to 20 members of the Early College Experience faculty.
Early College Experience (ECE) is an opportunity for students to take UConn courses while still in high school. Every UConn ECE course is equivalent to the same course at the University of Connecticut. There are approximately fifty courses in over twenty disciplines made available to partner high schools. Courses are taught on the high school campus by high school instructors who have been certified as adjunct faculty members by the University of Connecticut.
The Economics Department now offers Connecticut High School students three introductory economics classes at almost 30 high schools throughout the state. The workshop highlighted Professor Shor introducing the teachers to current thinking about behavioral economics and included discussions of best practices of integrating the political landscape into economic study, the economics of migration and immigration, the distributions of income and wealth, and current thinking about macroeconomics and money.
During the last decade ECE has grown to over 11,000 FTE students and from 2 economics instructors to 25. Professor Alpert is the ECE Economics Department Coordinator.
JPAM, Edited by Kenneth Couch at UConn, Ranked in Economics Top 40 and Top 3 of Public Administration
Based on Journal Citation Report data released this week, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) is ranked 31st within economics based on the two-year impact factor (2.58) and 37th based on the five-year impact factor (3.03) among 333 listed journals.
JPAM is also ranked second among 46 listed journals in the field of Public Administration using either the two or five-year impact factor. University of Connecticut Professor, Ken Couch, serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
Ken Couch of UConn visits RAND and USC
Kenneth Couch from UConn visited the Pardee Graduate School at RAND in Santa Monica, California in September where he made a research presentation.
While in Los Angeles, he also visited with one of his research collaborators, Julie Zissimopoulos, and a Co-Editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Elizabeth Graddy, at USC. Professor Graddy serves as Vice Provost of Academic and Faculty Affairs for USC.
Professor Prakash Presents Paper
Professor Nishith Prakash presented his paper titled, “Do Criminally Accused Politicians Affect Economic Outcomes? Evidence from India” at various places including Dartmouth College, Yale University and Wellesley College during the past spring semester.
Professor Prakash Receives World Bank Grant
Professor Nishith Prakash has received a $200,000 Knowledge, Learning and Innovation grant through the World Bank in support of the research project Performance-Based Incentives for Students – Answering Design and Operational Questions in Zanzibar. This is a joint project with Dr. Shwetlena Sabarwal (World Bank) and Professor Asadul Islam (Monash University).
This project will provide clear guidance to the Government of Zanzibar on how best to design and operationalize a results-based financing (RBF) approach for improving student performance in early grades of the secondary cycle, thereby reducing the high levels of student drop-out before secondary completion.
To this end, the grant will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of performance-based incentives targeted directly at students. Within this broad question, the evaluation will also examine the relative effectiveness of (i) different RBF design choices; and (ii) different RBF operational choices for most effectively mainstreaming such incentives using country systems.
The interventions are a part of a Government-led pilot that is being intensively supported by World Bank and is expected to help define the design of a new education project for Zanzibar.
Professor Naknoi Publishes in the Canadian Journal of Economics
Professor Naknoi’s paper titled “Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations, Wage Stickiness and Tradability” has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Economics.
Her study demonstrates that when factors of production is classified by their tradability, the relative wage of nontraded labor influences the real exchange rate through the relative cost of distribution services. She employs monthly data on the sector-level U.S.-Canada real exchange rate and the relative wage of service-producing labor. The relative wage accounts for 40% of the variability of the real exchange rate at a one-month horizon.
Furthermore, she constructs a measure of effective nontraded labor content to classify goods into nontraded and traded ones, and shows that the variability of the price of the nontraded-goods basket accounts for more than half of the variability of the real exchange rate.
Zheng Xu Defends Dissertation, Stays at Harvard
On August 28th, Zheng Xu defended his dissertation, “Developing in the Era of Globalization: The Case of China” written under the supervision of major advisor Professor Delia Furtado and associate advisors, Professor Nishith Prakash, Professor Kathleen Segerson, and Professor Richard Freeman from Harvard University.
Zheng’s dissertation studies how globalization has reshaped China in terms of the labor market, environment, and media. The first chapter examines how rising demand for Chinese exports affects Chinese labor markets. Particular emphasis is given to how the massive internal migration in China shapes the labor market consequences of trade. The second chapter studies whether party-newspapers in China are less likely to report local pollution events and whether the difference distorts households’ self-protective behaviors against potential health risks. The third chapter uses the list of environmental goods endorsed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to test whether export production improves air quality in China through adoption of green inputs.
Since September of 2013, Zheng has been a research fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. In 2014, he received a CLAS Graduate Fellowship which helped support his time at Harvard. Zheng has already started a new position as postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
Congratulations, Zheng!
Professor Ahking Publishes in the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement
Prof. Ahking’s paper “Measuring U.S. business cycles: A comparison of two methods and two indicators of economic activities” has been published by the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 199-216, 2015.
The paper compares the performance of two economic time series in capturing the U.S. business cycle turning points using two statistical methods.