Nemat Shafik - UMass Economics '83 Named First Female President of Columbia University

Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a leading economist whose career has focused on public policy and academia, will become the 20th president of Columbia University on July 1, 2023. Her election concludes a wide-ranging and intensive search launched after Lee C. Bollinger announced that he would step down as Columbia’s president at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year. Beyond her tenure as the president of the London School of Economics (where she was also the first female president), Shafik has served as the vice president of the World Bank, becoming the youngest person to hold the title, and the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Read more...

In Memoriam - James Crotty and Herbert Gintis

UMass recently lost two faculty members who definitively shaped the character of the Department of Economics over decades through their path-breaking research and teaching: James (Jim) Crotty and Herbert (Herb) Gintis. Through the years, Jim and Herb had an indelible positive impact on the lives of many at UMass and around the world – students, colleagues, and the UMass Economics family. Their ideas, vision, and enthusiasm will live on and continue to influence future generations of thinkers who recognize the need to challenge the status quo.  Read more here about Jim and Herb.

Deepankar Basu's Research on Hate Crimes in India in the Washington Post

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took control in 2014, hate crimes against minorities in India have skyrocketed by 300 percent, according to a 2019 study by Deepankar Basu, an economics professor who studies South Asian politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Since then, Modi’s party has only become stronger in India’s parliament, but updated hate crime statistics are hard to find, multiple experts said. After 2017, India’s crime bureau stopped collecting data on hate crimes, news reports show. Read more...

Statement on Racist Violence and Social Exclusion

Black Lives Matter. We declare and affirm this truth in the face of any verbal or material attempt to deny it. The current tragedies and structures of violence, exclusion and exploitation of Black people were made by human actors.  They date back to colonial times and slavery but persist to today. Teaching and research in the economics profession have often served to legitimize such structures portraying them as the outcome of the free and fair play of the market. The UMass Economics Department has a long tradition of research dedicated to uncovering structures of oppression, exploitation, exclusion and violence. This tradition must be rethought and adapted to place racial injustice at the center, as a dimension that should not be overlooked.

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