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For the last thirty-five years the Department of Economics, part of the College of Liberal Arts, has been a major player in the training of graduate students from all over the nation and the world and a major participant in the profession’s research dialogue.

The Graduate Program enrolls an average of twenty Ph. D. students per year, with a heavy presence of students from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. We offer fields of specialization not only along the traditional lines (Industrial Organization, Macro and Monetary Economics, International Economics, Labor, Public Finance and Microeconomic Theory) but also in Experimental and Behavioral Economics, a field in which members of the Department have played and continue to play a pioneering role. Physical facilities and a dedicated computer lab offer graduate students an ideal environment conducive to research.

The international diversity of the Department’s students body is matched by the composition of the faculty, in which, besides the United States, ten different countries are represented. With twenty-eight current faculty members, and expanding, the Department houses the Economics Research Laboratory (ERL) directed by John B. Van Huyck, Private Enterprise Research Center Rex B. Grey Professor of Economics. The ERL, one of the best-known in the country, is one of the outcomes of the pioneering work in experimental economics, started in the Department in the late sixties by Raymond Battalio, in association with John Kagel, now at Ohio State University. The University of Arizona, Purdue, CalTech and Texas A&M are usually regarded as the places where experimental economics and behavioral game theory got their start.

The Department’s Econometrics group includes some of the leading authorities in time series (Joon Park, the Everett Chair in Liberal Arts) and in non-parametric methods (Qi Li, the Hugh Roy Cullen Professor in Liberal Arts).

Presentation and discussion of research work by visitors, faculty and graduate students is intense, with four active Workshops meeting weekly. Faculty and graduate students in the Department often interact with their counterparts in the Department of Agricultural Economics and the Department of Statistics, one of the most prominent in the nation.

The Department is engaged in many other important research activities. The Texas Monetary Conference has met in the Spring of every year since 1993. The six major economic research institutions in Texas (the Departments of Economics at Rice, Southern Methodist and Texas A&M Universities and the Universities of Houston and Texas and the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) have alternated as hosts of this annual conference. The Texas Monetary Conference has consistently succeeded in having some of the top macro and monetary economists present their work, with discussants from the local sponsoring institutions. Texas A&M hosted the event in 1995, 2000, and 2006.

A similar and equally successful event in which the Department is involved is the Texas Camp Econometrics Conference , a collaborative effort of the Departments of Economics at the Universities of Houston and Texas, Rice and Southern Methodist Universities and Texas A&M University. Texas Camp Econometrics meets annually in the Spring, and the sponsoring Departments rotate as hosts. The primary goal of this conference is to bring together the econometricians and empirical economists of the participating institutions in order to present and discuss issues and papers in econometrics, both applied and theoretical. A related goal is to stimulate student interest in econometrics and help these students develop their research and presentation skills.

In December 1996, the Department of Economics assumed editorial  responsibilities for Economic Inquiry, the official academic journal of the Western Economic Association International. Economic Inquiry is widely regarded as an important broad-spectrum journals in economics, distinctive in trying to address a general audience of economists rather than pure specialists. Economic Inquiry was established in 1962, and has published numerous classic papers. It is published quarterly and has a worldwide circulation of about 3,500. Professor Dennis W. Jansen currently serves as Editor.

The home of the Economics Department since 1997 the Economics Department is the Robert H. and Judy Ley Allen Building, which also houses the Department of Political Science and the Bush School of Government and Public Service. The Allen building is part of the complex that includes the Bush Presidential Library and Museum and the impressive facilities of the Presidential Conference Center. The beautifully landscaped complex offers a perfect blend of pleasant quietness and a state-of-the-art facilities.

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