Chair's Corner

On behalf of the economics department, let me start by heartily congratulating Prof. Song on receiving tenure! Also let me give an early welcome to Prof. Christos Shiamptanis, who will be joining us next year. Prof. Shiamptanis is an international macroeconomist whose particular specialty is monetary policy in the European Union. He will teach international economic relations and time-series econometrics next year, as well as intermediate microeconomics and senior thesis. We look forward to having him with us.

In fall term, the department will be offering a number of courses, all of them interesting and engaging and excellent. Students who have never taken an economics course before should take Economics 101, Introduction to Economics. Students who took Economics 101 and would like to learn more about economics should take the brand-new Economics 225, The Economics of Sin, which covers markets for goods and services that are private “goods” that are social “bads,” such as transplantable organs, cigarettes, alcohol, sex, pornography, and illegal drugs. The course will combine familiar economic ideas with questions of ethics, morality, and public policy.

 Students ready to start the core of the economics major, or continue it, can take Economics 241, 242, and 243, which are intermediate micro, macro, and econometrics respectively. Those who have made progress on the core, or completed it, can choose Public Finance or International Finance. Last, all seniors should be taking senior thesis sometime next year. You should turn in your thesis advisor preference form by Monday May 5^th; if you don’t…. well, let’s just say nothing good will come of that.

 The professors in the economics love to talk about economics, so much so that we even do it outside of class. If there’s some topic in economics you’d like to know more about, or a current issue that interests you, or if you just don’t hear our lovely voices enough in your academic work, talk to your favorite professor and tell us what you’d like us to discuss. We’d love to have your suggestions for the Economics and Lunch series, or for Minerva talks, or any other ideas you have for discussing economics at Union.

 As I survive my first year as chair, I have increasing hopes for the idea that I might survive my second year as chair. I hope you all enjoy your summers as much as I’m going to enjoy mine, and look forward to seeing you back in fall! Except the graduating seniors, to whom we offer (a little early) our warmest congratulations.

 

Stephen J. Schmidt,
Economics Department Chair 

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Math prerequisites for Eco 241 and 242

The calculus prerequisite for ECO 241 and 242 may be satisfied by Math 110, 101, 113, or an AP calculus score of 3 or higher on either the AB or the BC exam.  Math 101 and 113 may be taken concurrently with Eco 241 or 242.

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Economics Support Center

Tutoring for Eco-101 students

Spring 2008 Schedule

Thursdays  

7:00—9:00 PM

(From 4/10/2008—6/5/2008)

Location:  Beuth House Work Room

Reminder:  Don't forget to bring your textbook.

 

Individual tutoring is also available—please see your instructor for more information.

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What is on Your Professor's Nightstand?
by Prof. Brad Lewis, Professor of Economics

 

Van Overtveldt, Johan. The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business.  Chicago: Agate (B2 Books), 2007.

By Brad Lewis, Professor of Economics

             It’s a pleasure to find a book devoted to my own graduate alma mater, and more pleasant still to have the sense, after reading it, that I recognize the place.  This comprehensive, excellent book on an American institution has been skillfully researched and written by a European, Johan Van Overtveldt, PhD, who directs a Belgian based think tank and has published widely in both Dutch and English. The research took almost a decade and included not only an extensive review of literature and time on campus but over 100 interviews.

            The book is accessible to undergraduate economics majors, especially those who have had enough courses to understand the basic context of the chapters. The experience of reading it may at times feel like drinking from an intellectual fire hose, but the narrative is clear and the treatment seldom bogs down in mathematics or the more arcane jargon sometimes characterizing professional publications.

            Van Overtveldt has managed to blend an excellent historical narrative on the school’s evolution with extensive biographical coverage of the actors in the process and  substantive discussions on every significant area of economics, broadly defined, that the denizens of Chicago touched. The author begins by citing the objective evidence for Chicago’s dominance. Most notably, 9 of 58 Nobel Prize laureates in Economics from its first awarding in 1969 have been primarily associated with the University of Chicago—more than double the number claimed by Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, which ranked second and third.  Another fifteen either did their most significant work at Chicago or were students or researchers there.

            Why did this notable place come to be notable?  For answers, the author first analyzes what he calls the Chicago Tradition: “The basic characteristics of this Chicago Tradition are: a strong work ethic, an unshakable belief in economics as a true science, academic excellence as the sole criterion for advancement, an intense debating culture focused on sharpening the critical mind, and the University of Chicago’s two-dimensional isolation.” The “two-dimensional isolation” refers to the University of Chicago’s location in the Midwest and the location of the campus itself and the homes of many faculty in Hyde Park, an enclave on the city’s South Side. 

            He distinguishes between the Chicago Tradition, which includes some characteristics of the University of Chicago as a whole and some that are “unique to its community of economists,” and the Chicago School. Most notably, he says, “the Chicago School is about a belief that the price mechanism is the key element in successfully solving economic problems and a belief in using this concept to understand and explain broad range of social phenomena.”  This widely shared view among Chicago economists has coexisted, however, from the very beginning, with a high degree of academic freedom for its faculty and a willingness to include on its faculty, and often even actively recruit, dissenters, including such noteworthy iconoclasts as Thorstein Veblen.

All of this rang true to me based on my graduate student days, with three signature experiences discussed by Van Overtveldt being very familiar. One is that despite the department’s emphasis on research productivity, the most famous Chicago economists (Jacob Viner, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker) have chosen to be the primary teachers of the introductory price theory sequence for graduate students.

A second is that quite a few of Chicago’s economists were then, and are now, actually on appointments in the University’s Graduate School of Business. The prevailing view, which anyone reading Van Overtfeldt will find unsurprising, was that the lessons of economics had widespread application. The easy mingling of students and faculty with primary interests in law and business as well as economics was a characteristic of the place.

The third is that the Chicago workshop system is at the heart of the department’s collective life and is the formative experience of graduate students after they turn their attention from core and field examinations to their dissertations. At these varied workshops, academic papers written by everyone from graduate students to distinguished Harvard professors are vetted in an atmosphere of vigorous discussion tending, in the opinions of some, to outright intellectual bloodletting. There is an intense focus on the perceived quality of the work and little concern about the status or credentials of those presenting them.

Van Overtveldt ends by pointing out that the Chicago Tradition is always at risk but that he is not a pessimist on its continuation.  It’s well worth taking the time to read his full narrative and find out why.

 

Look What Some Of Our Graduates Will Be Doing:
 

• Jessica Rudin will be working as a Global Markets Analyst for Deutsche Bank in New York City.
• Bailey Rand will be attending the London School of Economics for a 12-month Masters program in Social and Public Communication.
• Walter Yund – In the fall, he will start Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s PhD program in Industrial Engineering, where he will do research in energy markets, and hopefully complete the program by 2011.
• Courtney Chais – In the summer, she will be going to the University of Florida to attend the Warrington School of Business to obtain her Masters in International Business.
• John Traver will take a position as Chief Operating Officer at Samuel’s of Rhinebeck, NY, a company he has worked for more than seven years.  The company, based out-of-store in Rhinebeck, has been doing business for more than fourteen years.  John is working toward partnership in the company, whose goal is to achieve moderate in-store and large, out-of-store mail order growth.  Samuel’s is a coffee shop and confectionary backed by a strong and burgeoning corporate mail order business.
• Joshua DeBartolo will be working for Goldman Sachs as an Operations Analyst in Salt Lake City, UT.
• Jay Shah – After graduating from Union, will be attending Albany Medical College to pursue his medical degree.  He has also been taking classes to obtain his M.B.A. in Health Systems Administration.  With these degrees, he hopes to practice clinically and then eventually move to the business side of medicine.
• Shane Hubbell – will be joining Goldman Sachs team this July in Jersey City, NY as an Operations Analyst.

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Department Members Publish

 

A book by Hal Fried and Shelton Schmidt (co-authored with Knox Lovell) entitled  The Measurement of Productive Efficiency and Productivity Change, Oxford University Press (2008) hit the streets in January. In April,  Fuat Sener’s article entitled “R&D Policies, Scale Effects and Endogenous Growth” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economics Dynamics and Control. Steve Schmidt’s and Therese McCarty’s article entitled “Estimating Permanent and Transitory Income Elasticities of Education Spending from Panel Data” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Public Economics. Finally, Tomas Dvorak’s article (co-authored with Stephanie Curcuru and Frank Warnock) entitled “Cross-Border Returns Differentials” has been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

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Doing Business in China

(Roundtable discussion.)

 

Monday, May 5, 4:00 – 5:30 pm. 

Everest Lounge

 

The panelists include:

• Jonathan Heimer, US Dept. of Commerce
• Jerry Shay, Empire State Development
• Sam Sylvetsky, Fortitech, Inc.
• Lewis Davis, Economics Dept. Union College
• Zhang Wu, Political Science Dept. Union College