News

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (a leading Pennsylvanian newspaper ranked about 44 in the whole country) recently published Ugoantonio Troiano’s op-ed where he proposes a better way to deal with asylum seekers.

The Washington Post covers the article “The Introduction of the Income Tax, Fiscal Capacity, and Migration: Evidence from US States” which Ugoantonio Troiano co-authored with Mark Dincecco and Traviss Cassidy. The article is focused on the historical introduction of the income tax in the US states and proves how the income tax does not have only direct effects (increased government revenues) but also indirect effects, as the introduction of the income tax induced significant outmigration to non-income-tax states by middle- and high-earning households.

Congratulations to Aman Ullah, Distinguished Professor and emeritus, in the Department of Economics, for receiving the Outstanding Paper Award from the International Journal of Forecasting (IJF) for his paper on forecasting interval-valued data. The paper, joint with T.S. Tuang Buansing and Amos Golan, was published in the IJF in 2020 and was selected as the best paper among all the papers published in the journal in the previous two-year period. The award recognizes the originality, quality, and impact of the paper in the field of forecasting.

The paper proposes a novel and efficient method for forecasting data that consists of lower and upper bounds rather than single values. The authors apply their method to forecast the daily returns of the SP500 index up to five days ahead using 13 years of data. They show that their method outperforms other methods that are commonly used to forecast interval data under various criteria. You can read their paper here. Congratulations, Aman!

We would like to congratulate our 2022-2023 job candidates!  They are all moving on to exciting positions across the globe in academia.  Yongli Chen is joining Nankai University in China as an Assistant Research Fellow (i.e. Assistant Professor). Opinder Kaur is joining SUNY Buffalo as a Clinical Assistant Professor (tenure track). Ryoji Jinusyi has joined Seikei University in Japan as an Assistant Professor.  Yaojue Xu is joining Colby College as a Visiting Assistant Professor.

Professor of Economics Steven Helfand received the honor of becoming a Fellow of the Brazilian Society of Agricultural Economics  (SOBER). SOBER calls its Fellows “legendary members” in Portuguese. His new title represents society’s highest honor. Professor Helfand has been a member of SOBER since 1999. He traveled to Brazil in August 2022 to attend the ceremony to accept the award. [Read More]

We would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 job candidates!  They are all moving on to exciting positions across the globe in academia or in the private sector.  Justin Dang, Tao Wang, and Quanfeng Zhou are taking Assistant Professor positions at the University of San Diego, the University of Victoria (Canada), and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, respectively. Yanchao Yang will be going to DePaul University as a Clinical Instructor.  Meanwhile, Saman Banafti, Taghi Farzad, and Zhaozhen Zhao will be taking dynamic Economist positions at Amazon, Fannie Mae, and Diagonex, respectively.  We wish them all success in this next phase.

Deepshikha Batheja’s (Ph.D. 2020) study “Gender Peer Effects in Indian Call Centers”, received the Best Paper Award at the Indian Statistical Institute’s 3rd Annual Women in the Economy Workshop, and has been featured in the World Bank Development Impact Blog, Ideas for India, the International Growth Centre (IGC) blog, and the national daily Hindustan Times. Batheja conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) to study if the gender of co-workers mattered for call center employees in five Indian cities. For both male and female employees in mixed-gender teams, there was no negative effect on productivity. This, and other observations relating to mutual learning and knowledge spillovers, provide supportive evidence for integrating women into the workplace without additional costs to the firm.

Ruoyao Shi awarded Hellman Fellowship
Assistant Professor Ruoyao Shi was awarded a Hellman Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year to study homeownership assistance programs. Professor Shi will work on developing and calibrating a dynamic choice model that features the constraints that households face when they make housing decisions. With the model calibrated by the data on households’ actual housing decisions, Professor Shi hopes to quantify the significance of various barriers between disadvantaged households and homeownership, and more importantly, to evaluate the efficacy and the cost-effectiveness of popular homeownership assistance programs targeting disadvantaged households.

Assistant Professor Carolyn Sloane had her NBER research paper on pre-market human capital specialization and the college gender wage gap covered in the Wall Street Journal and CNBC:

Professor Emeritus Prasanta Pattanaik has been honored with one of India’s highest civilian Awards – the Padma Shri award (https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=197647). This award honors individuals who have distinguished themselves in various disciplines such as social work, public affairs, academic research, science, arts, civil service, among others, and who have made a profound contribution to social progress and to society.  The award will be conferred by the President of India at the ceremonial functions which are held at Rashtrapati Bhawan around March/April 2020.

CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2021!

We have made the following video to wish you all the best.

  • Assistant Professor Hiroki Nishimura was awarded a three year National Science Foundation grant to study “Preference Structures”. Professor Nishimura will work on developing an alternative model for describing individual preferences. By going beyond the classical approach to preference relations, Professor Nishimura hopes to narrow the gap between decision theory and behavior economics and offer useful methods in a wide variety of practical contexts and applications.
  • Distinguished Professor Aman Ullah received the UC Riverside Faculty Research Lecturer Award for the 2018-2019 academic year.  From its inception well over half a century ago, the Faculty Research Lecturer Award has been the highest honor that the UCR Academic Senate bestows. This award recognizes Professor Ullah’s international acclaim for his fundamental research in several areas of econometrics over the past five decades.
  • Emeritus Professor David Fairris has been named UCR’s 2018-19 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor. This award also provides financial support for his research project “Economic Policy When Society Holds Non-Consequentialist Views of the Good: The Case of the Minimum Wage.”  This academic senate award is presented yearly to an Emeritus Faculty on the basis of a compelling project in teaching, research, or public service activities.
  • Anil Deolalikar, Professor of Economics and founding Dean of the School of Public Policy, has been named chair of the Board of Directors of the UC Global Health Institute (UCGHI) as of August 2017.  The UCGHI is a system-wide initiative that promotes global health research, education, and collaboration to advance the UC’s mission to improve the lives of people in California and around the world (http://www.ucghi.universityofcalifornia.edu). The UCGHI Board of Directors oversees the executive leadership of the Institute and reports directly to the UC President.From 2009 to 2013, Deolalikar co-founded and co-directed the UCGHI One Health Center of Expertise which was hosted jointly by UCR and UC Davis.  The Center focused on examining the relationship between human health on the one hand and water, animals, food and society on the other. For further information, see http://www.ucghi.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucghi-names-new-board-chair.
  • Professors Carolyn M. Sloane and Michael Bates have both been awarded the  Blum Initiative’s Faculty Research Grant of $10,000 each. This initiative grant comes from the Blum Initiative for Global and Regional Poverty Studies, School of Public Policy. The grant to Carolyn M. Sloane was awarded for her proposed project for “Uncovering the Impact of Rising Local Wage Inequality on Urban Migration”, the grant awarded to Michael was for his project “Bridging Gaps in Teacher Recruiting and Retention: Evaluating targeted incentives “.
  • The Indian Econometric Society (TIES) has elected Distinguished Professor Aman Ullah among the first set of seven TIES Fellows (which include Professors C. R. Rao and Amartya Sen) based on his enormous contributions to the field of quantitative economics.
  • Distinguished Professor Richard Arnott has been awarded a  NSF award for 2016-17. The grant funding to him is $99,364, and it is awarded for  his research proposal  on “The Economics of Rush-Hour Traffic Dynamics: Beyond the Bottleneck Model”. Prior economic research on downtown rush-hour traffic dynamics has assumed that traffic flow (traffic density times traffic velocity) remains constant as traffic density increases.  But recent empirical work has shown, as intuition suggests, that under heavily congested conditions (traffic jam situations) traffic flow falls as traffic density increases (implying that the efficiency loss due to under-priced traffic congestion is potentially considerably higher than hitherto calculated). His proposed research develops micro-economic models of equilibrium rush-hour traffic dynamics that take this empirical regularity into account.  Since these models include delay-differential equations, novel methods need to be developed for their analytical and computational solution.
  • Professor Helfand was interviewed about the economic impact of the Olympics on the Canadian public television program “The Exchange”.  The 7 minute interview conducted on 8/8/16 can be found at the link below: http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/740379715712
  • Professor Susan Carter has been named the 2016-17 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor on the Riverside campus. Along with this prestigious position, Professor Carter receives a monetary award in the amount of  $6,000 and research support in the amount of $3,000. This academic senate award is presented yearly to an Emeritus Faculty on the basis of compelling project in teaching, research, or public service activities.
  • Professor Helfand has been awarded a $100,000 grant under a cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service to analyze farm productivity in Brazil. He is part of an international team that hopes to answer the question–what is the future of small farms in the United States and around the world?–by examining how productivity growth in agriculture has differed for small and large farms on five continents. Their findings may help policymakers around the world determine how best to support smaller farms that frequently have higher land productivity but lack the resources to be competitive in the marketplace.   More information can be found at: http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/34205
  • The 18th Southwest Economic Theory Conference (SWET) will be held on March 4-5, 2016, at the University of California, Riverside. This is an annual conference where economic theorists from various institutions in Southern California, Arizona and Hawaii present their latest work. This year the conference is being hosted by UCR Department of Economics. All sessions will take place in Glen Mor J315. The location map and the program are provided below. Please RSVP to David Malueg (david.malueg@ucr.edu) or Urmee Khan (urmee.khan@ucr.edu) if you are planning to attend. There is no registration fee.SWET 2016 Location Map
    SWET 2016 Program
  • Utkal University, India, has honored Professor Prasanta K. Pattanaik with its degree of  D. Litt. (Honoris Causa). The degree was conferred on Professor Pattanaik in the University’s convocation held on February 16th, 2016.
  • The series Advances in Econometrics will publish an special volume on Essays in honor of Aman Ullah, vol. 36, to honor the many scientific contributions of Distinguished Professor Aman Ullah in nonparametric and semiparametric methods, finite sample econometrics, information/entropy econometrics, and panel data models. The guest Editors for this special issue are R. Carter Hill (Louisiana State University), Tae-Hwy Lee, and Gloria Gonzalez-Rivera (UC-Riverside). (Book cover)
  • Professor Gloria Gonzalez-Rivera has been elected by the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF) as their next President. She will begin her tenure on May 1, 2016.
  • Economics of Transportation, the official journal of the International Transportation Economics Association, will publish a Special Issue on Collective Contributions in the Honor of Distinguished Professor Richard Arnott.  The Guest Editor for this special issue is Professor Andre de Palma at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in France.
  • Distinguished Professor Richard Sutch has been named the 2015-16 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor on the Riverside campus. Along with this prestigious position, Professor Sutch receives a monetary award in the amount of $6,000 and research support in the amount of $3,000. This academic senate award is presented yearly to an Emeritus Faculty on the basis of compelling project in teaching, research, or public service activities.
  • The Department is pleased be a sponsor for the 35th International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF) that will take place at Riverside Convention Center on June 21-24, 2015. The ISF is the premier forecasting conference attracting the world’s leading forecasting researchers in academia and industry. Professor Gloria González-Rivera (gloria.gonzalez@ucr.edu) is the General Chair of the 2015 Symposium. For more information on registration, keynote speakers, and other events, please visit http://forecasters.org/isf/.
  • A conference in honor of Distinguished Professor Aman Ullah to celebrate his long and productive academic career will take place at Riverside Mission Inn on March 13-15, 2015; see http://economics.ucr.edu/conferences/ullah/index.html for details. Prominent econometricians, who are Professor Ullah’s friends, coauthors and former/current students, will attend and participate in this conference. A festschrift volume in honor of Aman Ullah will be published by the series Advances in Econometrics.
  • Distinguished Professor Emeritus Richard Sutch has been elected as a Fellow of the Cliometric Society. This prestigious award is given for scholars who have published contributions to economic history that are markedly original and have significantly advanced the frontiers of knowledge. He will be receiving the award in the May 2015 meeting of the Cliometric Society in Ann Arbor.
  • Professor Ronald Chilcote has been named the 2014-15 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor on the Riverside campus of the University of California.  Along with this prestigious position, Professor Chilcote receives a monetary award in the amount of  $6,000 and research support in the amount of $3,000.  This academic senate award is presented yearly to an Emeritus Faculty on the basis of compelling project in teaching, research, or public service activities.
  • The Indian Econometric Society has elected Prasanta K. Pattanaik as its President for the year 2014-15. Established in 1960, the Indian Econometric Society is a large association of professional econometricians and quantitative economists, with more than 2000 members from India and other countries.
  • Professor Steven Helfand has been awarded $70,000 grant to evaluate United Nations agriculture sustainability project aimed at breaking cycle of poverty. For more on this please click the link http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/18554
  • Distinguished Professor Richard Arnott has been awarded a UCTC Faculty Research Grant for FY 2013-14. The grant funding to him is $88,798. It is awarded for his proposed research related to the engineering economics of downtown parking and traffic congestion.
  • Graduate Student Pallavi Panda Wins Prestigious Hewlett Dissertation Fellowship.
    Graduate student Pallavi Panda has been selected as one of seven fellows for the 2013-2015 Hewlett Foundation/IEE Dissertation Fellowship in Population, Reproductive Health, and Economic Development.
  • Professor Marcelle Chauvet’s Research Makes a Splash in Financial Blogs and Financial Markets.Professor Chauvet has developed a real‐time recession prediction model that is widely popular in the media and business community. She is consulted frequently by the U.S. government, foreign governments, and the regional and international business community. The model gives a real time assessment of the strength or weakness of the economy on a current basis and the results are regularly posted on her webpage.https://sites.google.com/site/marcellechauvet/probabilities-of-recessionThe probabilities from Chauvet and Piger (2008) are now being posted in the widely accessed FRED database from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis.http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RECPROUSM156NRecent probabilities readings caused turmoil in the financial markets:

    The interpretation was later on corrected by Chauvet and Piger and posted at:

  • A team of five faculty member from CHASS, CNAS and BCOE, including Professor Anil Deolalikar (who is co-PI), has been awarded a $3 million NSF IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) grant beginning July 2012.  The grant will provide four-year fellowships to several Ph.D students across all three colleges over a five-year period.  The selected students will pursue a doctoral degree in their respective fields but will also receive additional mentorship and training in the area of water (e.g., the supply of clean drinking water; the economics of water demand and distribution; the relationship between water and well-being, ect.).  Being an NSF grant, the fellowships will be open to US nationals and permanent residents interested in the field of water.  More information on IGERTs is available at www.igert.org.  The grant will be housed in the One Health Center, which is a Center of Expertise, co-directed by Professor Deolalikar, in the UC Global Health Institute.
  • Professor Helfand is the recipient of this year’s senior CHASS Distinguished Teaching Award.This includes the Patricia McSweeny McCauley Chair in Teaching Excellence, which is given to Professor Helfand because of his demonstrated excellence in teaching in CHASS.
  • Professor Mindy Marks research on changes in college student  time use has been featured in the NY Times, CNN and The  Boston Globe. The research documents that: “The average  student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying —  about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying”
  • Distinguished Professor Aman Ullah was honored for his contributions to the study of econometrics with an Inetrnational  Econometrics Symposium in the Southwestern University of  Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China, on May 24. The one-day conference was organized by Professors Qi Li and Li Gan of Texas A & M University and Essie Maasoumi of Emory University.
  • Professor Gloria Gonzalez-Rivera has been elected to the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters  (http://www.forecasters.org ).
  • Ullah Elected AAAS Fellow
    Professor Aman Ullah has been elected an American Association   for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow. Professor Ullah is recognized “for outstanding contributions in mathematical sciences, for outstanding contribution to graduate study, and for contributions in the field of statistical inference.” Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed by the AAAS because of efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. The fellows will receive official certification at the AAAS Annual Meeting on February 17, 2011 in Washington, D.C.
  • Professor Jorge Aguero has won one of only 4 Faculty Initiative Awards awarded by the Pacific Rim Research program for his Initiative Grant Proposal , “The Permanent Effects of Economic Crises on Child Health in Latin America ” for 2010-11.
  • Emeritus Professor Prasanta K. Pattanaik has been named UCR’s 2010 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor. This award also provides financial support for his two research projects. The first project is a study of changes in living standards in a village in India, and the second project is a book on individual rights and freedom in welfare economics.
  • Associate Dean Anil Deolalikar named co-director of the proposed Center of Expertise on One Health: Water, Animals, Food and Society a part of the new UC Global Health Initiative.
  • Associate Dean Anil Deolalikar named new Director of Center for Sustainable Suburban Development (CSSD) He will lead the UC Riverside center that studies issues related to the growth and development of suburbs around the world. More>>
  • Distinguished Professor R. Robert Russell received the 2008-09 Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award at UC Riverside. This award is to recognize his extremely active and successful role in supervising and mentoring a significant number of Ph.D. students in the Economics Department.
  • Distinguished Professor Richard Arnott has been awarded a UCTC Faculty Research Grant for FY 2008-09. The grant funding to him is $69,578, and it is awarded for his work on the research project “An Aggregative Model of Downtown Parking and Traffic Congestion: Introducing Mass Transit”.
  • Associate Dean Anil Deolalikar referenced in UC newsroom article “Global health impacts California economy” about research he is doing with graduate student, Arindam Nandi, on global health
  • The UCR Economics Department fared well in a recent study on the research output of 129 U.S. economics departments that offer PhD degreesOverall UCR Economics is 56th (but per faculty we are even better, 44).16th in Urban Economics, 33rd in Econometrics, and 34th in Microeconomics Read the entire article
  • Richard Arnott has been appointed as an Associate Editor of the academic journal Transportation Research Part B science. The general theme of the journal is the development and solution of problems that are adequately motivated to deal with important aspects of the design and/or analysis of transportation systems.
  • Richard Arnott received the 2008 WALTER ISARD AWARD from the North American Regional Science Council.This is awarded in recognition of his distinguished scholarly achievements in the field of regional science.
  • Aman Ullah is honored in 2008-09 as the Senior Fellow of the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis, Italy.
  • Professor Chauvet Op-Ed “Tumbling Dice” in the New York Times.
  • Professor Chauvet uses model to assess the real time probability of an economic recession – article in the New York Times.
  • Gloria Gonzalez-Rivera is one of the four faculty members who have been honored in 2006-07 with University Scholar awards, bringing to nine the total number of University Scholars on campus. Selected and awarded by the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, the awards recognize UCR’s rising stars: early-career, tenured faculty of outstanding merit. Gonzalez-Rivera studies time series econometrics and is renowned nationally and internationally for her work in the field of volatility modeling. Her widely cited research papers appear in the top econometrics journals; one of her papers has become a “classic” in time series literature. Gonzalez-Rivera’s methodological expertise has been applied to diverse research areas, including agricultural markets, developing countries, regulatory financial practice, and environmental measurement of quality of life.
  • R. Robert Russell has received the UC Riverside Faculty Research Lecturer Award for the 2006-2007 academic year. This award is the highest of faculty honors within the UC Riverside campus.
  • Richard Sutch has been elected as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2005.
  • Aman Ullah has been awarded the title of “Journal of Econometrics Charter Fellow”, 2005.
  • Jang-Ting Guo has been named “Outstanding Referee” for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2005.
  • Tae-Hwy Lee’s paper “Diagnostic Checking for Adequacy of Nonlinear Time Series Models”, Econometric Theory, Vol. 19, December 2003, 1065-1121 (co-authored with Yongmiao Hong) has been awarded the Tjalling C. Koopmans Econometric Theory Prize 2006. This prize was established as a memorial to Tjalling C. Koopmans, the 1975 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science. The Advisory Board of the journal selects a paper every three years among the papers published in the Econometric Theory. Lee’s paper is the winning article for the past three year period (2003-2005 inclusive).
  • The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland, has invited Prasanta Pattanaik to give a public lecture in November 2006. Created by Royal Charter in 1783, the Royal Society of Edinburgh is an educational organization with 1400 Fellows from different disciplines. One of its many functions is to organize ‘lectures, debates and conferences on topical issues of lasting importance’. Pattanaik’s lecture will outline how the economists’ notion of social welfare has evolved over time.
  • Prasanta Pattanaik has been invited to deliver the 2006 Condorcet Lectures in the University of Caen, France. Named after Marquis de Condorcet, the famous 18th century French mathematician, philosopher and voting theorist, and delivered annually, the Condorcet lectures are devoted to welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Pattanaik is the fourth lecturer in the series, the earlier lecturers being K. J. Arrow, D. Saari, and A.K. Sen. Pattanaik’s lectures will be on individual rights, freedom, and social welfare.
  • Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics honors Aman Ullah for Outstanding Contributions in Mathematical Sciences at the Eleventh International Conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics(December 27-29,2004) on Interdisciplinary Mathematical and Statistical Techniques at Sherwood College of Management, India.
  • Marcelle Chauvet named committee member of Dating Business Cycles in Brazil
  • Prasanta K. Pattanaik is awarded a Carnegie Centenary Professorship for Fall 2006 by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland
  • UCR economics professor gets USAID grant to study pathways from poverty in Brazil
  • UC Riverside Earns $1.5 Million National Science Foundation Grant to Examine How Engineered Crop Genes Stray
  • Professor Anil Deolalikar Named Director of the Public Policy Initiative
  • Professor David Fairris Appointed Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs
  • Economics Professor Prasanta Pattanaik to be Next President of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare
  • A recent graduate of our undergraduate program, Charles Ludd, Jr., was selected as a 2006-07 Judicial Administration Fellowship Program at the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State. For more information on this program, see the Program’s website at: http://www.csus.edu/calst/judicial/.
  • Jaehee Son has been invited to participate, as a Fellow, in the Program on Knowledge Networking and Capacity Building on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The program, which will consist of a course and an international conference, will be held during the period from 26 May 2005 to 13 June 2005.
  • Shatakshee Dhongde, a graduate student at the Department of Economics, received one of the five Graduate Research Awards (2004-05) awarded by the Graduate Student Association, University of California, Riverside. The award intends to highlight the excellent quality of research being done at University of California Riverside (UCR) by graduate students. The awardees presented a summary of their research at the award ceremony on April 25, 2005. Chancellor France A. Córdova and Dallas Rabenstein, Dean of the Graduate Division, and other UCR faculty attended the ceremony. Shatakshee’s presentation was entitled, “An Analysis of Effects of Growth and Income Distribution on Poverty”. Shatakshee’s dissertation co-chairs are Prasanta Pattanaik and Aman Ullah. In her dissertation, Shatakshee has decomposed and measured separately the effect of a rise in the income level and a change in the income distribution on poverty levels. This is the first ever attempt to decompose poverty levels in India across different states and over a period of time.
  • David Vazquez-Guzman has been invited to attend the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Economics and Psychology in Germany in August 2005. The Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Economics and Psychology is organized jointly by the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Strategic Interaction Group of the Max Planck Institute for Research into Human Systems, Jena, Germany. David is one of a small number of scholars from various countries, who have been invited to attend the Summer Institute.