News in the Department  
Current News | Newsletters | News Archives

Faculty in the News

2008-2009 News:

In November 2008, Andreea Balan Cohen presented her paper "Sobering Up: The Impact of the 1985-1988 Russian Prohibition on Child Health" at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Southern Economic Association. In January 2009, she chaired a session entitled "Natural Experiments in Health" at the American Economic Association annual meeting. At the AEA meeting, Andreea also presented two papers, the above-mentioned paper on Russian prohibition, and a paper on "The Causal Impact of Income on Health: Evidence from the Old Age Assistance Program in the United States."

Marcelo Bianconi was a participant at the Conference on "Micro and Macroeconomic Effects of Financial Globalization,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) National Universities Conference, Cambridge, MA, December 5 and 6, 2008, and was invited to present his paper on "Firm Value, Investment and Monetary Policy" at the graduate series of the Department of Economics of the University of Sao Paulo (FEA-USP), Sao Paulo, Brazil, May 7, 2009. His paper "Transfer Programs under Alternative Insurance Schemes and Liquidity Constraints," was accepted for in the Journal of International Trade and Economic Development.

At the end of December 2008, David Dapice went to Indonesia to discuss the global economic crisis with a large number of public enterprise executives and Bank Indonesia experts. Then he went to Myanmar for two weeks to investigate the state of agriculture there for an NGO. The trip included discussions with the government, and involved extensive travel to cyclone-hit areas and other areas from Yangon to north of Mandalay. In spring 2009 David Dapice was active in half a dozen symposia, meetings, etc. as panel member, chair, or discussant, including as discussant for the Reichschauer Lecture at Harvard in April

Ekaterina Gnedenko was awarded the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship award.

Yannis Ioannides was a discussant at a conference on "The Challenge of Reform in Greece: 1974-2009: Assessment and Prospects," Yale University, in May 2009. In June he was invited to discuss "The World Development Report, 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography" at the "Innovative City" Seminar, Argumenta, University of Helsinki, Finland, in June 2009, and participated in the conference "Housing Markets - A Shelter from the Storm or a Cause of the Storm?" sponsored by the Bank of Finland and SUERF, in Helsinki, where he also served on the panel "Political Economy of Housing Markets."

Gilbert Metcalf presented seminars at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, the National Center for Environmental Economics at the U.S. EPA, and Cambridge Energy Research Associates this past year. In addition, he was an invited presenter at various conferences including the Global Energy Choice Partnership Conference in Washington, DC, MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research annual meeting, Brookings Institution and Urban Institute's Conference on Tax Reform's Challenges and Opportunities, the Virginia Tax Study Group Conference at the University of Virginia Law School, and the University of Illinois Environmental Change Institute Symposium on Cap and Trade Policies held in Chicago. He also organized and presented in an American Economic Association session at the Annual Meetings in San Francisco on climate policy.

Metcalf gave other presentations including a Capitol Hill Briefing on Carbon Taxes held last December and a workshop for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. He was also an invited witness for a House Committee on Ways and Means hearing on Price Volatility in Climate Change Legislation held in March.

Metcalf currently serves as a member on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption that is completing a study on this topic to be published this fall. He is also organizing a conference on energy tax policy for the American Tax Policy Institute to be held in Washington in October. At Tufts Metcalf serves as a member of the Tufts University Retirement Investment Committee, a special committee tasked to provide advice and fiduciary oversight for Tufts University's 401(a), 403(b) and 457(b) Retirement Plans.

Various media have cited Metcalf's research on energy issues including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Albuquerque Journal among other sources. Metcalf was the subject of a feature interview in the January 2009 issue of Technology Review.

Stelios Michalopoulos was a Visiting Fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin (Italy) in Spring 2009. He was invited to present at various seminars held at Bocconi University, Brown University, Athens University of Economic and Business, Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Bologna, University of Connecticut, University of Modena. He also participated in several conferences, including the 2009 Royal Economic Society conference at Surrey University, England in April 2009, a conference on "Rethinking Ethnicity and Ethnic Strife", University of Budapest, Hungary, in September 2008, and a conference on "Borders and the Economics of Fragmentation", University of Warwick May 2009.

George Norman, Lynne Pepall, and Dan Richards are winners of a competition for 15,000 euros in grant funds from the Tilburg Institute for Law and Economics (TILEC) at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The award was made for proposed research on innovation, intellectual property, and competition policy that builds on recent work of Professors Norman, Pepall, and Richards on entry by established firms into markets with new products created by innovative startups.

Enrico Spolaore gave a lecture on "Efficiency and Stability of National Borders" for the opening of VIVES (Vlaams Instituut voor Economie en Samenleving) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in October, 2008, and a research seminar talk on Geography, History and Trade at the Graduate School of Economics of the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in December 2008. His paper on the Diffusion of Development (with Romain Wacziarg of UCLA) was published in May 2009 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Chih Ming Tan presented his paper "Is God in the Details?: A Reexamination of the Role of Religion in Economic Growth", coauthored with Steven Durlauf of the University of Wisconsin and Andros Kourtellos of the University of Cyprus, at the Rimini Workshop on Economic Growth at RCEA in Rimini, Italy in May 2009. His paper "No One True Path: Uncovering the Interplay Between Geography, Institutions, and Fractionalization in Economic Development", has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Please review our archives of News.

Back to top.

  Arts & Sciences  |  Tufts University  |  Admissions  |  Online Directory  |  Campus Map & Directions

© 2009 Department of Economics, Tufts University. All rights reserved.
Site designed and maintained by ITS.