Langlois book subject of glowing review

Professor Richard Langlois’s (IDEAS) 2007 book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy recently received a flattering review on EH.Net, the premier website in economic history and the history of economic thought. The author of the review, Arthur Diamond, Jr. (IDEAS), the Lucas Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska, praised the book’s “erudition in issues addressed, methods respected, and fields of research perused. To pull so much together, so well, is impressive. Equally impressive are Langlois’ credentials as a Schumpeter scholar: he was invited to deliver the Graz Schumpeter Lectures, which serve as the basis for the current succinct monograph. And in 2006, the manuscript was named a co-winner of the Schumpeter Prize from the International Schumpeter Society. Hopefully the accolades will be enough to … bring the book the wide readership that it deserves.”

EH.Net operates the Economic History Services web site and several electronic mailing lists to provide resources and promote communication among scholars in economic history and related fields. It is supported by the Economic History Association and other affiliated organizations: the Business History Conference, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Society, and the History of Economics Society. Its book reviews are distributed by email to a large number of economic historians, historians of economic thought, and interested readers of all sorts, thus reaching a wider audience than traditional book reviews in scholarly journals.

Economics alum combines academic research and public service

After completing his Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of Prof. Francis Ahking (IDEAS), Kenneth Daniels (IDEAS) joined the Department of Finance at Virginia Commonwealth University. A specialist in financial services and community development, Ken has published his research in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, The Journal of Corporate Finance, The Financial Review, and a rich variety of other professional journals. His most recent contribution is a co-authored paper titled “An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants and Pricing of Corporate Bond Clawbacks” in the Journal of Corporate Finance. For his earlier work on derivatives, he received the Sydney Futures Exchange Prize; the Eastern Finance Association offered similar recognition for a paper on investments.

Throughout his career, Ken has combined his academic research with various forms of public service. He serves as a Board Member of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Treasury Board, a group that oversees the state’s public banking deposits and debt and manages several state investment portfolios. He also is a Board Member of the Virginia Community Development Corporation and the Virginia Community Capital Corporation, the only non-profit bank holding corporation in the U.S.

PhD alumnus listed among top 100 young economists

Rangan Gupta (IDEAS) is a 2005 graduate, advised by Prof. Zimmermann (IDEAS) whose career is off to a flying start. A tenured professor at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and a very prolific author, he is now listed among the 100 top young economists on RePEc. As of this writing, he is listed at rank 97 for those with 10 years or less in their career. With four more years of eligibility, his ranking is sure to improve even more.

Department working paper series reaches 400 papers

Working papers are the most popular way for economists to follow the frontiers of research. These preprints are released often several years before they appear in print in journals, and some working paper series become quite prestigious. The Economics Department also has a working paper series, which now encompasses over 400 works.

Our series is indexed in RePEc and Econlit, and is one of the largest contributors to UConn’s open access digital repository, DigitalCommons@UConn. Through RePEc alone, the series gets over 1000 unique downloads a month, the most popular one having been downloaded over 2000 times.

Recent graduate Tsvetanka Karagoyozova heading to Lawrence University

This fall our alumnus, Tsvetanka Karagyozova, will join Lawrence University in Appleton, WI as an Assistant Professor of Economics. A liberal-arts institution charted in 1847, Lawrence was among the first colleges in the United States to be founded coeducational.

Tsvety defended her thesis in 2007 under the guidance of Prof. Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) and spent the last two years as a post-doctoral teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia. Tsvety’s research interests are in the field of financial economics, and more specifically in asset pricing and the economics of insurance. She is interested in how financial markets operate in the presence of informational asymmetries and in new models of individual decision-making in economics.

Prof. Ross wins CLAS research award

This spring the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences awarded its first ever Excellence in Research awards in the four divisions of the college. Professor Ross (IDEAS) of the Economics Department won the award in the Social Sciences for his research on a broad array of topics in Urban Economics including mortgage and housing discrimination, school segregation, and the impact of concentrated povery on labor market outcomes.

For more details about this award, see the CLAS announcement.

Summer Issue of The Connecticut Economy Focuses on Recession, State and Local Government Size, Income Inequality, and the UConn Health Center

The slumping economy has made Connecticut’s budget front-page news: state revenues are down 20 percent from a year ago, while surging demands for public assistance have governments at all levels stretched thin. The recession raises serious questions about the nature of the slump and public policy responses to it.

What is driving the recession in Connecticut is the focus of the Summer 2009 issue of The Connecticut Economy: A University of Connecticut Quarterly Review. Articles explore the likely impact of collapsing asset prices on the state’s GDP, the size of government in the Nutmeg state relative to the other 49 states, sources of family income inequality across Connecticut, and UConn’s vexing Health Center problem. Also in this issue, guest commentaries by House Majority Leader Denise Merrill and Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero offer contrasting insights on solving the state’s budget crisis.

For free access to this and other issues of The Connecticut Economy, visit: http://cteconomy.uconn.edu/.

Prof. Kimenyi appointed at Brookings Institution

Prof. Mwangi S. Kimenyi who previously had an appointment as a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institutions has joined the Washington-based think tank as a resident Senior Fellow. Prof. Kimenyi will be joining the Global Economy and Development Program and will be concentrating on policy issues concerning Africa’s economic growth. In addition to working closely with other colleagues at Brookings, Prof. Kimenyi will also be collaborating with researchers in African think tanks and policymakers. For more information, see the Brookings website and in particular this news release.

Two MA, PhD alumni publish new edition of popular textbook

A new edition of a popular health economics textbook, “Health Economics: Theory, Insights, and Industry Studies,” written by two of the Department’s former Ph.D. Students, Rexford Santerre (PhD, 1983) and Stephen Neun (PhD, 1988), will be published this June by South-Western/Cengage Learning.

Formerly a Professor of Economics at Bentley College, Rex Santerre (IDEAS) is now a Professor of Finance and Healthcare Management in the UConn School of Business. He has published extensively in the fields of health economics, local public finance, and industrial organization.

Steve Neun is currently the Academic Dean at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts. Prior to that he served as Professor Economics, Assistant VP for Academic Affairs, and Dean of the School of Graduate and Extended Studies at Utica College in upstate New York.

Prof. Dharmapala to leave department

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.