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Dr. Sposi has been chosen to receive the Barbara and James Mangum Teaching Award in recognition of his extraordinary student engagement.

Distinguished alum and private investor Charles Mangum gave a million dollar gift to SMU for two teaching awards – one in Economics and the other in Accounting, the two disciplines that (according to him) offered the most challenging courses in his undergraduate curriculum at SMU. The award is intended to “promote and reward the art of teaching”. The criteria for the award is that the recipient be non-tenured and extraordinary at student involvement. The award itself is named after his parents Barbara and James Magnum who live in New Orleans.

Charles Mangum graduated from SMU 1986 with a BA in Economics and a BBA in Finance. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1990 and has had a highly successful career in investment and portfolio management.

Dr. Desmet, along with coauthors Bruno Conte and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, discuss how a unilateral carbon tax introduced by the United States or the European Union may be a boon for the world, even in the short run. This Vox EU column goes into more discussion.

Former PhD student, Punarjit Roychowdhury, has been awarded the prestigious Prof. M.J. Manohar Rao Award 2021! The Indian Econometric Society (TIES) – the oldest and largest body of professional quantitative economists and econometricians with more than 2000 members from all over India and abroad – gives this award once a year to an Indian economist under the age of 35 years who has made outstanding contributions to quantitative economics while working in India.

Jun Nie, a 5th year PhD student in economics at SMU, had a paper accepted for publication at the European Journal of Political Economy. The paper, coauthored with James Lake, is called “The 2020 US Presidential Election and Trump’s Wars on Trade and Health Insurance”. Jun is interested in international trade, multinational firm structure, growth and structural change. He has exciting projects on the impact of trade on technology diffusion in explaining cross-country income differences as well as the role of multinationals and foreign direct investment on services trade. Take a look at his website for more information: https://sites.google.com/view/smu-jun/home.

Dr. Wookun Kim recently presented his working paper titled “Heterogeneous Local Employment Multipliers: Evidence from Relocations of Public Entities in South Korea”  in the Atlanta Fed’s Early Career Program Workshop. The authors (joint with Changsu Ko and Hwanoong Lee) estimate local employment multipliers following an episode of relocations of public entities in South Korea. They find that an introduction of one public sector employment increases the private sector employment by one unit, with employment growth in the services sector driving this increase in private sector employment. In addition to the effects being highly localized, their results imply that local employment multipliers tend to be higher in areas with predetermined characteristics that allow faster and larger general equilibrium responses to take place after the public sector shock. Here is a link to a summary, along with the other papers at the workshop: https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/macroblog/2022/10/20/atlanta-feds-early-career-visitor-program-workshop-synopsis.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Wheaton, Senior Lecturer in Dedman College’s Department of Economics, will serve as PI along with co-PI’s Corey Clark, Assistant Professor in the Guildhall and Computer Science Department and Raanju Sundararajan, Assistant Professor in Statistics Department for the DOJ’s $1.187M grant in support of the SMU Human Trafficking Project. With this funding, the SMU Human Trafficking Project will build a data warehouse to securely collect, enhance, analyze, and disseminate human trafficking data and conduct human-in-the-loop machine learning via human computational gaming, statistical, and economic research that can be used for policymaking.

The conference will take place Nov. 11-13 on SMU’s campus. The scientific committee is made up of faculty from SMU’s economics department as well as economists from the Dallas Fed’s research department.We anticipate more than 160 papers presented by authors from universities and policy institutions across the United States and around the world. Click here for the conference website.

Dr. Madera has been chosen to receive this award in recognition of her extraordinary student engagement.

Continue reading “Rocio Madera wins 2022 Mangum Teaching Award”

Dr. Hao Dong (left) and Dr. Wookun Kim (right) have been awarded a University Research Council grant, which funds SMU faculty research across the disciplines. Continue reading “Two economics professors win University grants”

Our department chair has been chosen to receive the 2022 Dedman Family Distinguished Professor Award. The award recognizes his significant research achievements and outstanding service to the university. He joins the past winners in the Economics department, Nathan Balke in 2007 and Santanu Roy in 2014. Congratulations, Dr. Millimet! Continue reading “Dan Millimet wins SMU Distinguished Professor award”