Mikhael Shor to join department

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Mikhael Shor, currently Assistant Professor of Economics at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, will be joining the department in Fall 2011. He specializes in the study of behavioral game theory and its applications to firm-level decision making. Professor Shor has authored many scholarly articles on auctions, behavioral aspects of marketing, and electronic commerce. His research has appeared in such journals as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Management Information Systems, Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Psychology, and Contemporary Accounting Research. He has participated in merger analysis and strategic game theory consulting for the Federal Trade Commission and several companies. research interests are in game theory, industrial organization, and experimental economics. His current theoretical research is on the implications of mergers in auction markets, and my experimental research (supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health) is on decision making when faced with an overwhelming number of options.

Professor Shor has taught game theory, industrial organization, pricing strategies, economics of networks, and law and economics. His educational innovations and materials have been featured in Science, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Shor holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD from Rutgers University. He is living in Coventry with two kids, Eliana and Jacob, and a soon-to-be-added pound puppy. His wife is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at UConn.

Emeritus Steve Sacks reports on life after retirement

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There have been some rough times: lots of nights sleeping in a homeless shelter and quite a bit of time in jail. But in the end it’s worked out well, and now we’re comfortably settled in a small but very pleasant apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

This year I’ve cut down to one night a month at the homeless shelter, but when one of the other volunteers doesn’t show up, I may put in an extra night on short notice. I can’t say it’s fun, setting up cots for the “guests” and serving dinner, then sleeping on a cheap cot in an overheated hallway where there’s always a light on, and then getting up at 5:30 a.m. But there’s considerable satisfaction in knowing that I’m playing a small part in providing a safe, warm, dry night to some people who’ve had bad luck.

Let me explain about the time I spent in jail. My part in a project to study average time from arrest to arraignment in Manhattan started with a phone call from a consulting firm in Cambridge. Over a period of about 20 years, I had worked frequently with this firm to develop software intended to optimize patrol patterns for police cars in urban areas. In this new project for the New York City Office of Criminal Justice, we were asked to create a computer simulation of the steps taken from the time an arrest is made until the accused is brought before a judge. In New York, the law says that arraignment before a judge must occur no more than 24 hours after an arrest. During that time quite a lot has to happen: finger prints must be taken and sent to Albany and to the FBI, a database of arrest warrants must be searched to find out if the accused is wanted in another part of the state or in any of the other 49 states, the Attorney General’s office must decide whether to recommend bail and must write up formal charges, an affidavit has to be written and signed by the arresting officer, in many cases a Legal Aid attorney must be called in, … The amount of paperwork is substantial and the appropriate documents must be in the right place at the right time. Then, too, the prisoner must be in the right place at the right time, and that involves moving him or her from the scene of the offense to the precinct to holding cells to the courtroom. All of this has to be completed within 24 hours or the Civil Liberties Union gets upset. (Sometimes, on a busy day, the 24-hour limit is exceeded.)

The purpose of our simulation is to give criminal justice planners a tool that lets them do what-if analysis: what would happen to the process if more fingerprint clerks were hired? suppose we increase the number of printers available for downloading warrants from Albany? would it matter if we did the medical exam after the fingerprinting instead of before? would the whole process be faster if we built more holding cells under the courthouse? Experimenting with the virtual reality of this analytical tool is an alternative to actually hiring more people, really changing procedures, or physically building more cells. The goal is to find the most effective, and least expensive, modifications to a set of interconnected queues so as to reduce the total time a prisoner is in the system.

In order to create an accurate simulation, we needed to have a very complete understanding of how the system works. We spent months studying every detail. Since I live in New York, I was part of the team that spent a lot of time behind bars, mostly in the basement of Manhattan’s central courthouse. Now that our project is finished, I don’t spend any time in jail, but there were many days when I was in fact inside. To step through those metal gates and hear them snap closed behind me was a sobering experience, even though I was pretty sure that they would let me out. We also sat behind a judge in a courtroom as he dealt with a rapid-fire series of defendants, lawyers, and Assistant Attorneys General. All of this was a real education for me, endlessly fascinating.

I realize now that I haven’t said anything about how I spend most of my time in retirement. But that must be obvious if you know that I live in New York city, where there’s theatre, concerts, movies, museums, readings, ethnic neighborhoods to explore, Brooklyn’s magnificent Promenade to stroll along, swimming (yes, there are swimming pools in New York city), yoga classes, … Retirement is terrific. Everyone should do it.

I miss Storrs and the people there. But I’m glad that we have made this big move. Living in New York continues to be an exciting adventure. Occasionally, we get back to Connecticut for a visit and sometimes old friends come to New York. Most important, making new friends here didn’t take as long as I had feared, even in a city of eight million people.

New class set to graduate

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On Saturday May 8, 2010, a new class of students will walk in the commencement ceremonies and get well-deserved degrees. As there are no December ceremonies any more, the walking class in larger than usual. 212 students will be receiving the BA in Economics, of which 40 are double majors. Seven students will be graduating with Honors in Economics: Joseph Antelmi, Michael Bokoff, Taylor Brown, Charles Johnson, Bryan Murphy, Eric Roy, and William Watson. The Economics major is very popular on campus, in previous years it has been the third most sought after. Note also that among all Economics degree granting institutions in the United States, the University of Connecticut ranks 26th by the number of degrees conferred last year.

We also have a graduating class in our graduate programs. Are graduating with a MA: Jay Adams, Demet Cimen, Amy Druckenmiller, Elnara Eynullayeva, Elizabeth Kaletski, Xingkang Liu, Xiaoyin Shen, Rijesh Shrestha, Li Wang, Menxi Ying and He Zang. And with a PhD: Lei Chen, Onur Burak Celik, Marina-Selini Katsaiti, Monica Lopez-Anuarbe, Zinnia Mukherjee and Natalya Shelkova.

Prof. Cosgel named department head

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Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), has announced that Prof. Metin Cosgel has been named head of the department of Economics, starting July 1, 2010. He says:

Professor Cosgel has been a member of the CLAS faculty since Fall of 1989. He has written extensively on the political economy of religion and has an ongoing project to study the economic history of the Ottoman Empire. In 2007, he received the Barkan Article Prize for the best article in the field of Ottoman and Turkish Studies awarded by the Turkish Studies Association. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal “Economic History of Developing Regions” and is a CLAS representative to the Provost’s International Executive Council.

Professor Couch Associate Editor of Journal of Income Distribution

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Professor Kenneth Couch recently joined the Journal of Income Distribution as an Associate Editor. The Journal of Income Distribution has an international readership and is based in Canada. The purpose of the Journal of Income Distribution is to foster scholarly research internationally into all aspects of income distribution. The Journal supports theoretical, empirical, and technical studies pertaining to income distribution research and its methodologies. The editorial board of the journal includes leading scholars in the area of income distribution. Professor Couch also serves as an Editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Phi Beta Kappa Welcomes New Initiates

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Founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary, Phi Beta Kappa is an undergraduate honors society that celebrates excellence in the liberal arts. Its long list of distinguished members—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, President Theodore Roosevelt, etc.—just got a little longer. UConn’s Epsilon Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa recently added 8 senior Economic majors to its list of members: Joseph Antelmi, Michael Samuel Bokoff, Tyler David Gold, John R. Harry, Yixian Lai, Margaret Lynn McCarthy, Eric Burton Roy, and Alex Keller Upton. The Department of Economics congratulates this group of outstanding students.

Prof. Furtado publishes in AER P&P

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In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Prof. Delia Furtado and coauthor, Heinrich Hock (Mathematica Policy Research), explore the role of immigration in explaining the labor supply and fertility decisions of high-education U.S. native women. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that low-skilled immigration decreases the price of childcare services, making it easier for career-minded women to combine work and family. The authors find that large inflows of immigrants to a city attenuate the negative relationship between female labor force participation and fertility, which translates into an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home.

Relative to women in most other developed countries, American women have very high rates of labor force participation and fertility. This is especially remarkable given how many countries have family leave and subsidy policies that are far more generous than those in the United States. The results in this paper point to immigration as a partial explanation for this phenomenon. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skill native women. Prof. Furtado plans to continue this line of research in future work.

Each May, the AER Papers and Proceedings publishes a sampling of the papers presented at the Annual Meeting of American Economics Association. A working paper version of the article is available here.

Shadow economies under the volcano ash cloud

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PhD student Catalina Granda-Carvajal (advisor, prof. Zimmermann) has been invited to present last week in an international workshop in Germany, “Shadow Economy, Tax Policy and Labor Markets in International Comparison: Options for Economic Policy“. This workshop was held at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, with the aim to demonstrate advances in the analysis of shadow economic activity and discuss how these can be used for better economic policies. Granda’s paper, entitled “The Unofficial Economy and the Business Cycle: A Test for Theories”, uses official data to establish a set of business cycle features and study how they vary across countries with the size of the unofficial sector, and compares these empirical regularities with the predictions of existing theories on macroeconomic fluctuations in economies featuring underground activities.

After having the chance to exchange ideas with young scholars and with some of the world experts in the field, Granda has been faced with the uncertainty imposed by the volcanic ash cloud in Iceland. Being stuck in Berlin has not been an easy situation; however, she reports “I have spent some time sightseeing, visiting museums and, overall, taking advantage of such a ‘forced tourism’. With plenty of history while trying to stand as a leader in arts and promoting Western values, now I understand why this city is one of the most exciting places in Europe. All in all, I cannot complain, but I cannot wait for the flight back to Storrs to share with my friends and colleagues how this experience has enriched my life and view of things.”

Boot Camp Economics

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How did you spend your winter break? For most students it did not include more course work! But for 1,152 UConn students it was an opportunity to take an intensive two-week Winter Intersession course. Five of the 55 Winter 2010 classes offered at the Storrs campus were online courses. Classes began December 28, 2009 and ended January 15, 2010–only 19 calendar days for a course that usually spans a 15-week semester. One of the online courses was Econ 1201, Principles of Microeconomics, taught by Prof. Oskar Harmon. Students taking the course signed up for 16 days of online lectures, homework, and exams, with two days off for New Year’s Eve and Day, and one day to prepare for a proctored cumulative 2-hour final exam.

Some students apparently had second thoughts about spending their entire winter break immersed in economics: only 30 of the 45 students who initially signed up for the course remained enrolled when the class began. Two of the four course exams were proctored. Most students sat for the proctored exams in the Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE) building at Storrs, but some took the exams at other campuses (UConn-Stamford, University of Rochester, and University of Maryland).

Twenty-seven students completed the course, and the average score on the cumulative final exam differed by only one point from the average final exam score in the same course taught by Professor Harmon in the regular Fall 2009 term. Students in the two courses had similar self-reported GPAs and a similar distribution of majors, but students in the winter course typically were closer to graduation: about 40% were seniors compared to only about 20% in the fall course. Also a much larger percentage of students were not working during the winter course (45%) than during the fall course (20%). In an exit poll, students were asked: “Knowing what you know now, would you recommend a similar intensive online course to a friend?” and “Can you describe the experience of taking a 16-week course in a 2-week term?” About 25% of the respondents would definitely take a similar course and consistently described the experience as “intense, but a good use of my time.” About 50% would possibly recommend this intersession course to a friend. Their descriptions of the experience ranged from: “Really hard; if you are not fully committed to this course you will not do well,” to “Very, very challenging. I put so much effort into doing well in the course and I was still struggling. A lot of information to tackle in 2 weeks.” And 25% would likely or definitely not recommend the course to a friend, describing the experience as: “Not recommended, too compressed,” and “Econ is much too hard to learn over the Internet.”

An email from a student who completed the 2-week micro course and is now taking the companion 16-week macro course describes the experience as an “immersion” and notes that: “I feel like I’m slacking when I don’t pick up a macro book everyday, because my mindset from micro was all day every day.”

Prof. Alpert contributes to American Thinker blog

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Why is there a remarkable stock market rally in the midst of the worst recession (depression) since 1930? While we hear explanations of every day’s rise and fall of the indices (e.g., the “whatever” numbers were not as bad as expected, or they were better than anticipated), the obvious answer is that a few serious investors have studied their (arcane) National Income and Product Accounting. The stock market is rising because extraordinarily high corporate profits are just around the corner. This is what Prof. Alpert writes in a contribution to the American Thinker blog.

American Thinker is a daily internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans. Contributors are accomplished in fields beyond journalism, and animated to write for the general public out of concern for the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda.

There is no limit to the topics appearing on American Thinker. National security in all its dimensions, strategic, economic, diplomatic, and military is emphasized. The right to exist and the survival of the State of Israel are of great importance to us. Business, science, technology, medicine, management, and economics in their practical and ethical dimensions are also emphasized, as is the state of American culture.