Department News

Assistant Professor Jonathan Meer has been appointed as Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research's program for Education. The NBER is one of the most prominent economics research organizations in the USA. See more about NBER at http://www.nber.org/ and more about Dr. Meer's research at http://econweb.tamu.edu/jmeer/.

Economics minor Rachel M. Taylor has been named as the first recipient of the Professor Svetozar Pejovich Future Leaders Award. The Pejovich Award, established by Dr. Sheila Amin Gutierrez de Pineres '88 and Alexandra Pejovich Chilton, is given to a Texas A&M undergraduate student who has secured an internship with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. The award's namesake is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Texas A&M, where he taught for more than twenty years. Pejovich is the author of several influential articles and books including The Economics of Property Rights: Towards a Theory of Comparative Systems, and Law, Informal Rules and Economic Performance: The Case For Common Law, and the recipient of The Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement in Teaching Award in 1987.

Alice Schneider, a senior Texas A&M Economics major, will spend the summer with the Illinois Policy Institute in Chicago as a public policy intern through the Koch Summer Fellows Program. As one of eighty interns from throughout the country, she will also attend career and public policy seminars in Washington D.C.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has named Alice Schneider, a senior Texas A&M Economics major, as the student representative to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. In this role, Ms. Schneider will represent students from all Texas colleges and universities. Her term will begin June 1,2013 and run until May 31, 2014.

Five Texas A&M Economics undergraduate students have been selected to receive scholarships established by donors to the Department of Economics. Shahid Ahmed and Devita Gunawan, both seniors, are the recipients of the Neal Hahn Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship was established by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hahn in memory of their son, Neal, who was an honors Economics major at Texas A&M. Jacquelyn Smyth, a junior Economics major, received the Elkin Scholarship in Economics. This award was established by Jeffrey and Valorie Elkin of Houston. Additionally, Phillip Warren, a junior, and Alice Schneider, a senior, earned the Jacquelene M. Browning Memorial Scholarship. This award honors the memory of Dr. Jacquelene M. Browning, Visiting Associate Professor and Assistant Department Head of Economics at Texas A&M and the wife of Dr. Edgar K. Browning, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Texas A&M.

The Department of Economics at Texas A&M hosted, on April 6th and 7th, the 2013 Texas Monetary Conference. This conference congregated economists from the economics departments at Rice, Southern Methodist and Texas A&M Universities, the Universities of Houston and Texas, and the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who were joined by a top line of presenters: James Bullard (FRB-St. Louis), Simon Gilchrist (Boston University), Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (Princeton University), Zheng Liu (FRB-San Francisco), Eric Sims (University of Notre Dame) and Martin Uribe (Columbia University). Click here for more information.

Professor Qi Li received the 2013 Distinguished Achievement Awards in Research by the Texas A&M University. The award, presented by the Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University, is conferred to scholars who have exhibited the highest standards of excellence in research at Texas A&M. For more information see here.

The Review of Economic Dynamics has accepted for publication Leonardo "Pepe" Auernheimer's paper "The Role of Inventories and Capacity Utilization as Shock Absorbers," coauthored with his student and Texas A&M University doctoral graduate Danilo Trupkin. Danilo is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Universidad de Montevideo in Uruguay. Professor Auernheimer (1936-2010) was a Texas A&M scholar for thirty eight years. His main interests were monetary economics and open economy macroeconomics. Pepe invested himself generously in his dissertation students, and this publication with Danilo serves as a wonderful testimony to Pepe's craft and dedication.

The Department of Economics is pleased to announce that Justin Aufderhar has been awarded the annual Department of Economics Award for Leadership and Academic Excellence. Justin was one of twelve finalists in the national Pearson Economics Insiders competition, presenting his research on foreign direct investment in Paraguay in Washington, D.C. Additionally, he interned at the Peace Corps through the Texas A&M Public Policy Internship Program and served in leadership roles in student organizations. He earned University and Foundation honors upon graduating in December 2012 with a B.S. in Economics and plans to attend law school.

Three students in the Economics Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (EUROP) presented their research at the Dallas Federal Reserve's Economic Scholars Undergraduate Research Conference: Matthew Liu, Matthew Struble, and Derek Welborn. Liu conducted a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which price discrimination affects buying and selling behavior and Struble researched whether individuals re-optimize their choices using data from Texas A&M University meal plan purchases. Welborn's ongoing research uses data from DonorsChoose.org to determine the degree to which matching grants for donations crowd out giving.

Fourth year Ph.D. student Jinkook Lee is the winner of the Graduate Paper Competition for the Western Social Sciences Association Annual Meeting in Denver this coming April for the paper titled: "Airport-Airline Vertical Contract Market Power in the US Airline Industry." As part of the award Mr. Lee will receive a cash prize presented at the Presidential Luncheon at the April 2013 WSSA conference, a free one-year subscription to the Social Science Journal, free conference registration, and the opportunity to present his paper at that conference.

Professor Dennis Jansen was one of three invited keynote speakers at the International Conference on "Policy Analysis Using Modern Econometric Methods" held in December at Capital University of Economics and Business (Beijing, China). Professor Jansen gave a talk on the topic "Monetary Policy and Stock Returns in Bull and Bear Markets". The other two keynote speakers were Professor Jianqiang Fan from Princeton University and Professor Cheng Hsiao from University of Southern California. Professors Fan and Hsiao are both editors of the Journal of Econometrics and are world renowned econometricians. More than 100 academics from the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China attended the conference.

Associate Professor Mark Hoekstra is the recipient, along with Professor Scott Carrell of UC-Davis, of the 2012 IZA Young Economist Award. The award, which comes with prize money of 5,000 Euros, honors an outstanding paper in labor economics written by researchers under the age of 40. The award-winning paper is entitled "Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids,", and was published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. For more information on the award and a list of previous winners, see here.

Associate Professor Mark Hoekstra's research on castle doctrine/stand-your-ground laws, coauthored with Ph.D. student Cheng Cheng, was featured in NPR's All Things Considered on January 2, 2013. See the article and listen to Professor Hoekstra's interview here. The paper, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources, is available here.

Professor Li Gan's research on income inequality and unemployment rate in China has been featured in a wide range of reports by leading news media. See the articles in The Economist, CNN, and Wall Street Journal .