Graduate Programs
The economics department offers separate programs leading to the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees. The department’s faculty members have an orientation toward applied and policy-related economics that is built on a strong foundation of economic theory and statistical and econometric methods.
The department has a low graduate student -to-faculty ratio. The average number of students in an entering Ph.D. class ranges from 8 to 12 with a somewhat larger number entering the M.A. program. This small size allows for more interaction between faculty and students than is found in other programs with larger numbers of students. The department enjoys strong loyalty from its many distinguished alumni, who have positions in academia, business, and government.
Recent Graduate Research
Two graduate students, Guanyu Liu and Tianyun Zhu, were awarded the Melvin Eggers Graduate Economics Scholarship for Doctoral Students. This scholarship, established in 1994, provides scholarships to graduate students studying economics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, with preference given to students studying for a doctoral degree who intend to teach at the college level. The fund, which honors former chancellor and economics department chairman, Melvin Eggers, allows Maxwell to attract high caliber students to the economic department's PhD program.
Guanyu Liu's research applies Model Averaging techniques to the estimation of treatment effects with longitudinal data. His new Model Averaging estimator for treatment effects is shown to be consistent and its asymptotic distribution is established. It is also shown, through simulations, to generate more accurate predictions and better statistical inference (based on subsampling). He has applied his new estimator to analyze the economic impact of Ukraine's conflict in 2013.
Tianyun Zhu's research proposes a new approach to recover the implicit price elasticity of amenity demand. He derives a likelihood-based estimator for the implicit price elasticity from the theory of bidding and sorting. His approach accounts for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in preferences and avoids the endogeneity. The estimator also allows characterizing the sorting equilibrium and partially recovering the bid function, which is essential in implementing welfare analysis. He applies his new approach to the estimation of the implicit price elasticity of demand for public high school quality and neighborhood ethnic composition in Cleveland, OH.
For more information about the Melvin Eggers scholarship, please contact Norma Shannon at nshannon@maxwell.syr.edu.
- Hoang Pham recently defended his dissertation. He
had studied how opening economically to trade affects competition in the domestic labor
market. Additionally, Hoang studies the impacts of globalization on productivity growth
and intergenerational mobility in developing countries. The three
chapters of his dissertation will be submitted as three separate papers to economics journals. He will be joining Oregon State University as Assistant Professor of
Economics in the fall.
- Ross Jestrab's research studies the motives for trade
agreements. He examines the effect of domestic labor mobility on the formation
of trade agreements. In an ongoing project, he is examining whether countries
use trade agreements to internalize their motive or to manipulate the trading
partners price.
- Yimin Yi studied the link between the elimination of trade policy uncertainty by the
grant of permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status to China by the U.S.
Congress. He has additionally examined the evolution of China’s manufacturing
employment. He has two other ongoing projects: (a) an estimation of a dynamic
stochastic structural model of firm-level import and export decisions,
including that firm’s future productivity path; and (b) the impact of the 2018
US-China trade war on global supply chains.
- Nam Seok Kim, in a paper coauthored with Leyla
Karakas and Devashish Mitra,
used the Swedish National Election Survey to study attitudes towards trade
and immigration, while examining their effect on voting behavior. The paper has been
submitted to a journal. He is currently working on another paper that studies the impact of
trade and immigration on election outcomes.
- Dan Zhang is currently analyzing how FDI
liberalization in China influences the wage markdown (wage/marginal revenue
product) by worker education levels. FDI liberalization can attract some
foreign firms which pay a higher wage especially to highly educated workers,
thereby changing employment levels of local firms and their wage markdowns.
- Huong Tran has been conducting research related
to the estimation of the distribution of wages. In many countries, the
distribution of earnings is skewed to the right. There are economic theories
that can explain this right-skewness, which can be divided into three groups:
chance, choice by economic agents, and institutional factors such as the
minimum wage. Which economic theory produces a probability density function of
(log) wage that is the closest to the truth? The answer to this question has
important implications for distributive justice and public policy, since
questions in those fields rely on the estimation of counterfactual densities of
(log) wages. However, this task has not been carried out in a real empirical
setting. Huong estimates the probability density function of (log) wage implied
by economic theories of the distribution of earnings, and ranks the theories
using statistical measures of closeness between the fitted density and the true
density. Using a nationally representative Brazilian cross-sectional household
survey for the year 2001, she finds that the minimum wage should be modeled
explicitly in any labor market where a minimum wage policy is implemented since,
otherwise, the resulting predicted density significantly differs from the true
density of (log) wages.
- Dahae Choo has been evaluating the effects of a pro-natalist
policy introduced by local governments in South Korea, a country with one of
the lowest fertility rates worldwide. Given that in South Korea marriage is
largely a pre-condition to childbearing, Dahae accounts for the joint decision
to marry and have children. Her setting is rich compared to other settings in
which similar policies have been evaluated (in other countries, the policies
are set at the national level): in South Korea the local nature of the policy implies
that there is rich variation in transfer amounts that can be used for
identification. Also, Dahae is able to estimate fertility responses at
different transfer levels. Her results suggest that the policy has no
substantial effect on the total number of children or the probability of having
a child, casting some doubt on the effectiveness of the policy. Her results
suggest that an additional 1,000 USD transfer from the program would increase
the birth probability by just 0.26 percentage points, implying that only 0.89%
more married females would enter into maternity due to the policy. Dahae also
analyzes the time-to-motherhood, which could lead to fertility increases in the
long run. She finds that a 1,000 USD transfer from the program induced females
to have their first child eight months earlier, but the timing of her second
delivery was not affected. Collectively, the results indicate that the policy
does not seem to fulfill its goal.