Department working paper series reaches 400 papers

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.