economics at boston college
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Economics Ph.D. candidates available for employment

A number of current and prospective graduates of the Boston College Economics Ph.D. program are participating in the job market this winter. A list of those participating, with full details on their fields, research and advisors is now available.

Jim Anderson chairs the department

James E. Anderson Following six very successful years of leading the department of economics, Prof. Marvin Kraus has stepped down as chairperson, and Prof. Jim Anderson is the department's new leader. Kraus presided over the department's successful recruitment efforts and a review of the department's undergraduate program that led to significant strengthening of the curriculum during a time of very heavy demand for the undergraduate major. During his tenure, the department realised a long-standing goal and gained its first endowed chairs in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The department's graduate program, as noted below, rose in the rankings over the years of Kraus's chairmanship.

James E. Anderson, the department's first chairholder, is the William B. Neenan, SJ Millennium Chair in Economics, honoring the noted economist and University administrator. Anderson, an Oberlin College graduate and recipient of the Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969, has spent his entire professional career on the Boston College faculty, being promoted to Professor in 1977. He is one of the department's most noted scholars, having published numerous articles in leading journals on the theory of international trade and trade policy. In the last decade he has focused on index numbers of trade policy. His recent work on the evaluation of trade policy, Measuring the Restrictiveness of International Trade Policy, coauthored with J. Peter Neary, was published by MIT Press in 2006. Anderson is perhaps best known for the economic theory of gravity (AER, 1979). Multilateral resistance indexes capture the effect on bilateral trade of the partners' trade costs with all other parties. Applications resolve the border puzzle (why the US-Canada border appears so costly; AER, 2003) and the mystery of the missing globalization (why gravity coefficients are constant yet trade/GDP rises; NBER, 2008). A related line of research focuses on insecurity and its implicit effect on trade.

Anderson is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a Visiting Scholar an the Institute for International Economic Studies (Stockholm), Harvard University, University of Konstanz, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Brookings Institution and London School of Economics.

26 July 2009
 

Beauchamp, Fulford join the BC economics faculty

Last year's faculty recruitment season was exceedingly successful, with the department filling one economics position and one position joint with BC's popular International Studies program. Andrew Beauchamp joins us from Duke University, where he completed the Ph.D. under the supervision of Peter Arcidiacono after his undergraduate work at Michigan State University. His research interests lie in applied microeconomics, labor economics and industrial organization. Beauchamp's dissertation is "Family Formation and Equilibrium Influences"; his working papers include studies on abortion supplier dynamics, high school dating and the relationship between family formation and the demand for abortion. He will be teaching graduate labor economics this fall and undergraduate industrial economics next spring.

Scott Fulford is our joint hire in economics and international studies. He recently completed the Ph.D. at Princeton University, focusing on development economics, macroeconomics and applied microeconomics. He earned a BA in economics and a BS in mathematics from Stanford University. Fulford presented "Financial access in buffer-stock economies: Evidence from India" at a Boston College seminar; some of his other work also focuses on cohort returns to education, banking, and fertility in India. He will be teaching an upper-level elective in development economics this fall and a lower-level elective for economics and international studies students next spring.

We are delighted to welcome Profs. Beauchamp and Fulford to the Boston College economics faculty.

26 July 2009
 

Cathy Schneider lauded at retirement dinner

Director of Undergraduate Studies Catherine Schneider was honored on the occasion of her forthcoming retirement at a gala dinner in Burns Library on April 16th.
 

Schneider, an adjunct associate professor, joined the BC economics faculty in 1982 after receiving her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1980. Her old gold academic gown graced many BC commencement exercises through the years. She has taught principles of economics in the large section format, public finance, micro theory, transportation economics, mathematical economics and an innovative course on economics and Catholic social teaching. For the past several years, she has served the department as assistant chair and director of the undergraduate program, working tirelessly to bring reforms to that program in the face of ever-growing enrollments and major declarations. She has also served as advisor to Omicron Delta Epsilon, the national honor society, and as the founding sponsor of the BC Equestrian Club.

Several faculty spoke warmly of Cathy's contributions to her students and colleagues over the years, and expressed how deeply she will be missed. She promises that if BC's Brighton Campus expansion plans include a stable for her beloved horses, she will return and take the reins!

We are very grateful for Cathy Schneider's dedicated service and efforts to improve our department and its offerings.

19 May 2009
 

Major soars in popularity

Economics is well-known as a countercylical discipline (when the Dow tanks, who are you going to call?), and undergraduates' interest in economics waxes and wanes. This fall's enrollment statistics from the Office of Student Services, reported in the BC Chronicle of 8 October, show a dramatic increase in majors where 'math is in demand', including economics. Enrollments in physics, mathematics, chemistry, computer science, accounting, finance and economics are all up. Communication remains the largest major (944 declared), with economics at 804 counting both Arts & Sciences majors and Carroll School of Management concentrators. Finance (another CSOM concentration) comes in at 772. Economics also provides a significant number of courses to International Studies majors, and has a departmental minor attracting over 90 A&S students.

15 Oct 2009

Two BC authors in the latest AER

The June, 2009 issue of the profession's leading scholarly journal, the American Economic Review, contains two contributions from the BC EC faculty. Roche Chair Arthur Lewbel's article, "Tricks with Hicks: The EASI Demand System", coauthored with Krishna Pendakur of Simon Fraser University, appears on pages 827-863. Murray and Monti Professor Peter Ireland's paper, "On the Welfare Cost of Inflation and the Recent Behavior of Money Demand," appears on pages 1040-1052. Both papers are available in preprint form on the authors' web pages, linked above.

09 Sep 2009
 

An addition to the company of scholars

The latest addition to the department's roster of Ph.D.s is Elizaveta Shevyakhova, who defended on November 13. Shevyakhova, a native of Russia, wrote "Two Essays in Economics", advised by Roche Prof. Arthur Lewbel. Our congratulations to Dr. Shevyakhova.

17 Nov 2009

Recent publications highlighted

An up-to-date list of the recent published articles of department faculty that appear in RePEc services such as IDEAS and EconPapers is now available, courtesy of the IDEAS RePEc service. To appear on this list, faculty must be registered with RePec, the journal must be included in RePEc listings (as almost all journals of note are) and the author must 'claim' their article.

04 Nov 2009
 

Department rises in U.S. News rankings

The BC Economics PhD program is rated 31st in the nation in the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings of graduate programs, tied with Michigan State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. BC EC's score of 3.2 has risen from 2.8 in 2001 (ranked 40th) and 3.0 in 2005 (ranked 36th). The steady improvement in the program's peer assessment ranking reflects the quality of new faculty hires, graduate student recruitment and the placement of completed PhDs.

The Economics PhD program is among the highest ranked in the graduate school, with sociology (ranked 41st) and psychology (ranked 66th) also showing gains in the 2009 peer assessment by faculty, deans and other academic administrators.

19 May 2009
 

BC EC 2009 and all prior issues available

The October, 2009 edition of BC EC, the department's annual newsletter, is now available in PDF format, as are all prior issues of BC EC back to Vol. 1, Issue 1 of 1978. In an upgrade to our printing practices, hardcopies of the 2009 issue are printed in living color.

23 October 2009

Recent news from the Department of Economics...

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Updated: 2009/11/17
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