News

Kevin F. Hallock, UMass Economics '91 Named next President of the University of Richmond

UMass-Amherst Economics 1991 graduate Kevin F. Hallock was named the next President of the University of Richmond.  A member of Phi Beta Kappa (1990), Dr. Hallock received a B.A. degree in economics, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1991) and an M.A. (1993) and Ph.D. (1995) from Princeton University, both in economics. He began his career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and joined the Cornell faculty in 2005. He has won multiple awards for teaching excellence and has been an invaluable mentor to hundreds of undergraduate students throughout his career, many of whom have been engaged with his research. He has also served as advisor or dissertation committee chair for 50 Ph.D. students, many of whom are now themselves distinguished and accomplished scholars at prestigious institutions, government agencies, and NGOs.

Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force - Travis Campbell

By UMass Doctoral student Travis Campbell. Has Black Lives Matter influenced police lethal use-of-force? A difference-in-differences design finds census places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides over the ensuing five years, around 300 fewer deaths. The gap in lethal use-of-force between places with and without protests widens over these subsequent years and is most prominent when protests are large or frequent. This result holds for alternative specifications, estimators, police homicide datasets, and population screens; however, it does not hold if lethal use-of-force is normalized by violent crime or arrests. Protests also influence local police agencies, which may explain the reduction. Agencies with local protests become more likely to obtain body-cameras, expand community policing, receive a larger operating budget, and reduce the number of property crime-related arrests, but forego some black officer employment and college education requirements.

Faculty Book Release: The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems - Nancy Folbre

A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economist. In this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and reformulation of Marxian political economy, drawing on a larger body of scientific research, including neoclassical economics, sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology, to answer the defining question of feminist political economy: why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has improved living standards and increased the scope for individual choice for women; on the other, increased inequality and the weakening of families and communities have reconfigured gender inequalities, leaving caregivers particularly vulnerable.

Arin Dube Profiled in Bloomberg: The Burger Flipper Who Became a World Expert on the Minimum Wage

Arin DubeAs a 16-year-old kid flipping burgers at a Seattle McDonald’s in 1989, Arindrajit Dube was earning the state minimum wage of $3.85 an hour. “I remember feeling privileged that I was going to go on to college, while there were many older workers working at that wage,” he recalls. He still thinks about the minimum wage, only now it’s from his perch at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he’s possibly the world’s leading authority on its economic effects.

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The Association for Social Economics awards PhD student Travis Campbell the Warren Samuels Prize

Umass PhD student, Travis Campbell, has won the 2021 Warren Samuels Prize.  The prize is awarded to a paper and presented each January at The Association for Social Economics meetings, that best exemplifies scholarly work that is of high quality, is important to the project of social economics, and has broad appeal across disciplines. The Association for Social Economics (ASE) is a scholarly research association whose members study economic, social, political, and cultural issues to understand and promote human dignity, justice, and the full flourishing of all members of society. ASE and the Review of Social Economy are fully committed to the promotion of diversity and inclusion in the profession. 

Faculty Book Release: Informal Women Workers in the Global South - Jayati Ghosh

Policies and Practices for the Formalisation of Women's Employment in Developing Economies. This book examines the varying trajectories of formalisation and their impact on women workers in five developing countries in Asia and Africa: India, Thailand, South Africa, Ghana and Morocco. They range from low- to middle-income countries, which are integrated into global financial and goods markets to differing degrees and have varying labour market and macroeconomic conditions.  Formalising employment is a desirable policy goal, but how it is done matters greatly, especially for women workers. Indeed, formalisation policies that do not recognise gendered realities and prevailing socio-economic conditions may be less effective and even counterproductive.

 

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) awards the 2020 Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award to UMass Economics PhD candidate Leila Gautham

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2020 Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award, Leila Gautham, a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
 
The Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award is named in honor of the founder of Re:Gender (formerly the National Council for Research on Women), a U.S.-based gender research institution that merged with ICRW in 2016. Mariam was a leader in shaping and launching the women’s studies academic and research movements in the United States and around the world. Through the Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award, Mariam’s work fostering high-level scholarship and promoting mentorship continues through its support of a first-generation doctoral student conducting research to advance gender equality and social inclusion.

Professor Emeritus James Crotty Awarded the Japan Society of Political Economy Routledge Book Prize

The Japan Society of Political Economy Routledge Book Prizei was awarded to University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Emeritus James Crotty for his book, Capitalism, Macroeconomics and Reality: Understanding Globalization, Financialization, Competition and Crisis: Selected Papers of James Crotty 2017/04/28, Edward Elgar Pub. --- with special reference: James Crotty, Keynes Against Capitalism; His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism. The prize encourages members of the JSPE to publish their work in English and to challenge the growing dominance of orthodox neo-liberal economics among economists and policy-makers. It also promotes studies in heterodox economics all over the world.

 

UN Global Sustainable Solutions Winter School

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme teams undertaking river restoration in Kerala. Photo by Sudmeier-Rieux/UNEP, 2019UMass Amherst graduate students are invited to apply for the UN Global Sustainable Solutions Winter School, a free, ten-week course focused on water security, ecosystem-based climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction. The course is a partnership between the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy, McMaster University, and the United Nations University.
 
The course will run from December 3 to January 26. Students will take part in weekly seminars via Zoom, where they will hear from guest speakers from the United Nations, governmental agencies, NGOs, and other international organizations. The ninety-minute sessions will also include class discussions.
 
“Students will learn from international experts about water security and ecosystems for disaster risk reduction,” said Professor Marta Vicarelli at UMass Amherst School of Public Policy and Department of Economics, who is organizing the course with Nidhi Nagabhatla of the United Nations University and McMaster University.

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