The Department mourns the loss of Prof. Kimenyi

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Photo credit: BMI Murithi and Nation Media Group

kimenyi-picThe Department mourns the loss of one of its own. Prof. Kimenyi was a former member of the Department before leaving to join the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. According to BMI Muriithi of the Daily Nation, he passed away on Saturday, June 6, at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, after a long illness. BMI Muriithi’s article in Daily Nation is available.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his wife, Irene, and his three sons. Condolences and sympathy can be sent to:  Irene Wangui Kimenyi , 2011 Wheaton Haven Court, Silver Springs, MD 20902.

 

The following is a note of memorium written by Prof. Richard Langlois:

A note in memorium of Mwangi S. (Samson) Kimenyi
from his friends and former colleagues at the University of Connecticut

We in the Department of Economics at the University of Connecticut were truly grieved to hear of Samson’s passing.

Samson came to us in 1991 and left to form KIPPRA in 1999, and was thereafter only sporadically in residence in Storrs. But he was with us for almost the entire decade of the nineties. We had hired him away from the University of Mississippi and awarded him the rank of Associate Professor less than five years after his Ph.D., which is an extraordinary rate of advancement. What attracted us to Samson was his astounding rate of publication, on a variety of topics. Among these publications was work on poverty in the United States, which focused on the importance of family structure – and which won the prize for best paper in the Southern Economic Journal. What we discovered after Samson had been with us a short while is that we had hired a wonderful man as well as a wonderful scholar. Those of us who came to know him well found that family was just not an intellectual interest for him but was part of his being, and we admired his devotion to his wife Irene and his three boys, who largely grew up here in Mansfield.

The problem with hiring a superstar, however, is that the world beckons. As Samson’s interests moved in the direction of African development, and as he became increasingly well known in that field, he was tapped to form KIPPRA and then called to the Brookings Institution. But we always considered Samson to have remained a member of our faculty in spirit. Many of us remember his visit part-way through the KIPPRA experience, which was memorable for a seminar in which he shared with us some of his accomplishments and challenges in Kenya.

In a way, we at UConn had already learned to miss Samson. Knowing that the parting is now final is a tragedy to us. But we will always remember his tenure here; and the spirit of his intellectual achievements and his warm personality will always remain part of our department legacy. We wish his family comfort in their time of grief.

 

Professor Shor publishes in Operations Research Letters

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505567Professor Mikhael Shor has had his paper, “How collaborative forecasting can reduce forecast accuracy,” accepted by Operations Research Letters.

The brief article compares an independent supplier and retailer who each forecast consumer demand with a jointly-profit-maximizing supplier and retailer who share their forecasts of consumer demand. The move from non-collaborative to collaborative forecasting can have the unexpected impact of decreasing demand forecast accuracy while still increasing profit. Therefore, collaborating firms should maintain a focus on profits, not forecast accuracy, as the appropriate measure of success.

Professor Hallwood Wins Outstanding Researcher Award

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hallwoodProfessor Paul Hallwood last week was awarded the Outstanding Researcher award by the Avery Point Director, Professor Marty Wood.  The prize is awarded annually to faculty including the science departments.

The citations mentioned that Professor Hallwood is the author of 10 books and about 70 papers in refereed journals, and that he is active in applied work – notably in redesigning a tax system for the Scottish government and earlier as an economic advisor to the Government of Saudi Arabia.

Professors Miceli and Segerson Cited in The Economist

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micelisegersonAn article on land assembly in developing countries published in the May 2nd-8th 2015 edition of The Economist cited a paper by economics professors Thomas Miceli and Kathleen Segerson. The article discusses problems developing countries face in assembling land for large-scale economic development projects.

The author writes, “A theoretical model set out in a paper published in 2011 by Thomas Miceli and Kathleen Segerson of the University of Connecticut shows that when a buyer has to negotiate in sequence with sellers of contiguous plots of land, the price of each successive sale will rise. Landowners know the project cannot proceed unless the buyer acquires all the plots he needs. The more he acquires, the greater the cost of abandoning the project. The ransom those yet to sell can demand increases accordingly.”

The article referred to is “Land Assembly and the Holdout Problem Under Sequential Bargaining,” which was published in the American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 14 (2012): 372-390.

Prof. Ahking presents paper at conferences

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ahking-e1405970870634-150x150Prof. Ahking presented a paper “The Economies of the Great Lakes States” at the 54th Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association in Mobile, AL, March 26 – 28.  He also presented the paper at the 2014 Southern Economic Association Annual Meetings in Atlanta, GA, in November 2014. The conference paper is available for download from ResearchGate.