Prof. Dharmapala to leave department

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After seven years with the department, Prof. Dharmapala is leaving us for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Hired as an assistant professor in 2002 following postdoctoral positions at Harvard and the Australian National University, he was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2008. A specialist in public finance who holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, Dharmapala’s interests also encompass tax policy, corporate finance, and the economic analysis of law.

At UIUC, Dharmapala will join the College of Law, which has a substantial group of scholars in Law and Economics. In addition, he will hold an appointment as Professor of Finance (by courtesy) in the College of Business. His wife, Jennifer Delaney, who holds a PhD from Stanford University’s School of Education, will join the faculty of the College of Education at UIUC. We regret the departure of one of our more outstanding professors, and wish him all the best in his new appointment.

Prof. Randolph awarded Human Rights Institute Fellowship

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Prof. Susan Randolph (IDEAS) has been awarded the 2009-2010 Human Rights Fellowship at the UConn Human Rights Institute. The Human Rights Institute Fellowship is competitively awarded to one faculty member each year. Application for the fellowship is open to all tenure track faculty in all disciplines at Storrs and regional University of Connecticut campuses. The fellowship was announced in 2006 and provides one semester course release time for research projects on human rights. Professor Randolph is the 4th winner of the fellowship.

In response to an increasing demand for rigorous monitoring of States’ accountability in meeting their human rights obligations, a growing literature has emerged on measuring human rights fulfillment. However, the monitoring and promotion of human rights have emphasized political and civil rights; comparatively little attention has been focused on economic and social rights. Data are increasing used in human rights assessment and advocacy, but, especially with regard to economic social rights, ad hoc approaches dominate. Along with her collaborators, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Terra Lawson-Remer, Prof. Randolph has developed two alternative rigorous methodologies for monitoring State accountability in meeting economic and social rights obligations. The Human Rights fellowship will be used to write a book that fully documents the index and compares the alternative methodologies, investigates ways of integrating the principle of non-discrimination, and explores the policy implications of the index. The project ultimately seeks (a) a broad understanding of the sorts of policies and private initiatives that effectively foster the fulfillment of economic and social rights, (b) an understanding of the synergy between political, civil and economic and social rights, and (c) an understanding of the trade-offs and synergies between economic policies fostering income growth and economic efficiency versus those fostering economic and social rights provisions. To facilitate the realization of these broader goals, the fellowship will be used to apply for external grants to establish an Economic and Social Rights Accountability Program.

Prof. Segerson president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

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Prof. Kathleen Segerson (IDEAS), the Philip E. Austin Chair of Economics, was recently elected to a 2-year term as President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). AERE is an international professional association for economists working on the environment and natural resources. It was founded as a means for exchanging ideas, stimulating research, and promoting graduate training in environmental and resource economics. AERE currently has over 800 members from more than thirty nations, coming from academic institutions, the public sector, and private industry. It has two journals, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM) and the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP). It sponsors sessions at several meetings, including those held by the Allied Social Science Associations, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Southern Economic Association, and Western Economics Association International. Segerson has previously served as Vice-President and a member of the Board of Directors of AERE.

Recent PhD Rimvydas Baltaduonis heading to Gettysburg College

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Recent graduate Rimvydas Baltaduonis (IDEAS), advised by Vicki Knoblauch (IDEAS), is finishing up his post-doc fellowship at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University where he worked with a world renowned team of experimental economists including a 2002 Nobel laureate in economics Vernon L. Smith (IDEAS). In August, Rim will begin a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. During last two years as a post-doc fellow at George Mason University and then at Chapman University, Rim continued his research of electric power markets and helped organizing numerous workshops in experimental economics for graduate, undergraduate and high school students, public utility regulators, businessmen, faculty and high school teachers. He conducted workshops in Virginia, California, Colorado, Guatemala and recently in Lithuania. These workshops in experimental economics are designed to promote research, teaching and learning of economics through laboratory experiments. Before Rim assumes his position at Gettysburg this fall, he will spend summer (actually winter!) months as a Visiting Fellow in Experimental Economics at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Prof. Hallwood publishes book on finances of Scotland

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Professor Paul Hallwood will publish his eighth book in July this year: The Political Economy of Financing Scottish Government: Considering a New Constitutional Settlement for Scotland (with Ronald MacDonald), Edward Elgar Publishers, Cheltenham, 2009. Series editor Wallace Oates writes of the book “Hallwood and MacDonald make a compelling case for the devolution of fiscal authority to Scotland to increase fiscal autonomy and improve fiscal performance. They suggest not only the need for such devolution but provide a careful analysis and blueprint of how to do it.” Additionally, the book is motivated to find a fiscal settlement for Scotland that is most likely to hold the United Kingdom together at a time when the separatist Scottish National Party forms the Scottish administration. The topic is creating quite a stir already, see this article in the Scotsman.

The book is also available on Amazon

Natalya Shelkova defends thesis, heads to Guilford College

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Natalya Shelkova (IDEAS) defended her thesis on Thursday, May 21 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS). In her research she studies the possibility of collusion by low-wage employers at the non-binding minimum wage. She tests this hypothesis empirically in the chapter titled “Low-wage labor markets and the power of suggestion”, a version of which is a part of both our department’s working paper series as well as Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section working papers series. She also constructed a search-theoretic model that allows for partial collusion at the minimum wage, resulting in replication of both the minimum wage spike and wage dispersion.

In August Natalya starts her new job as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. Guilford College, established in 1837 as one of the country colleges founded by Quakers, is strongly committed to the ideals of peace, social justice and equality. The Quakers of Greensboro cared for the wounded soldiers on both sides during the American Revolutionary War, and harbored runaway slaves seeking to escape to the North during the antebellum era. Natalya is very excited about her new job and about the opportunity to work and contribute to such a historic place.

Article by PhD alumnus Rangan Gupta among the hottest in Journal of Economics and Business

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Elsevier recently announced that an article by Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) in the Journal of Economics and Business was among the most downloaded on its site. Tax evasion and financial repression was one of the chapters of his UConn PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS).

Using an overlapping generation model, Gupta studies how tax evasion interacts with financial repression, as expressed by a high reserve deposit ratio requirement in banks. Applied to southern European countries, he finds that a higher degree of tax evasion, resulting from lower penalty rates and higher corruption, produces in a social optimum higher degrees of financial repression. However, higher degrees of tax evasion, due to lower tax rates, tend to reduce the optimal degree of financial repression. Thus, there are asymmetries in the relationship between reserve requirements and tax evasion. More importantly, tax evasion and financial repression are positively correlated if and only if the change in the former results from an alteration in the penalty rate or the level of corruption.

Prof. Zimmermann gives plenary talk at Open Access conference in Geneva

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Prof. Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) spoke last week at the sixth CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6) in Geneva. This meeting assembles digital librarians from around the world as they discuss issues about the digital and open dissemination of research (open access).

Zimmermann’s talk discussed on how to engage a community in a research dissemination project by catering to the various incentives of its participants. By taking as example the RePEc Author Service he administers, he showed that one can push a major bibliographic project without any funding by letting everyone who benefits from it help out. This decentralization of the work has been critical to the success of RePEc.

Prof. Ross speaks on NPR

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Professor Ross (IDEAS) has just been featured on the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network as he spoke about the regulation overhaul announced by President Obama. He strongly supported the proposal to increase the oversight and regulation of large “Too Big to Fail” non-bank financial institutions and to make the Federal Reserve responsible for regulating these institutions arguing that the Federal Reserve employs some of the best economists in the country. Ross has worked extensively on mortgage markets.

Article by Prof. Ross among most cited in Journal of Urban Economics

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Professor Ross (IDEAS) has just won the Journal of Urban Economics Highly Cited Author Award 2004-2008 for his article Redlining, The Community Reinvestment Act, and Private Mortgage Insurance (with Geoffrey Tootell) for being one of the 10 most cited articles between 2004 and 2008 in this journal. The paper finds that lenders respond to the Community Reinvestment Act by favoring borrowers who obtain Private Mortgage Insurance in low income neighborhoods. In past research, this paper had masked differencing in lending across neighborhood and suggests that previous research has underestimated the importance of neighborhood in mortgage lending decisions. The paper has been of interest and cited by researchers across many fields including Economics, Finance, Real Estate, Geography, and Public Policy.