Royal Economic Society (RES) Symposium of Junior Researchers 2016

Royal Economic Society

Submissions are invited for the Symposium of Junior Researchers 2016 of the Royal Economic Society, taking place on Thursday 24 March 2016 at the University of Sussex, Brighton.

We invite submissions of papers from PhD students and early career researchers in any field of economics. The details for submissions are as follows:

The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Stefan Dercon (University of Oxford).

This event is a one-day conference for junior researchers that will follow the RES annual conference. The main objective of the Symposium is to bring together young economists at different stages of their research and to foster discussion and dissemination in all areas of economics.

In addition to parallel sessions with discussion, there will be time and space for poster presentations.

Authors of papers accepted for presentation at the Symposium will have the chance to win an award for the best paper of £100 and have the opportunity to present her/his paper in a plenary session.

Further information about the conference, including details of financial assistance for PhD students, is available on the conference webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/resjunsym/home

Please do not hesitate to email the local organizing committee at res.junior.symposium@gmail.com if you have any questions relating to the conference.

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School of Business, Management and Economics staff win big with University Excellence in Teaching Awards

School of Business, Management and Economics

School of Business, Management and Economics staff win big with University Excellence in Teaching Awards

The hard work of academics and support staff in the School of Business, Management and Economics (BMEc) has been recognised with the announcement that nine of 41 winners of the University’s annual Excellence in Teaching Awards work within the School.

The awards, which invite nominations by students and staff from across the University in start of each spring term, celebrate outstanding achievement in teaching and support.

Head of School Prof Steven McGuire said:

“It is with great pleasure that I congratulate those in BMEc honoured by these awards. This much-deserved recognition of their hard work clearly reflects the positive experience of our students at all levels, both in terms of their teaching and the support they’ve received in enhancing their studies with professional placements – I’d like to extend my thanks on behalf of the School to everyone involved”

The School’s Director of Teaching and Learning Dr Julie Litchfield – who as Chair of the School Teaching and Learning Committee helps determine the winners – commented on the achievements of each recipient:

Outstanding or Innovative Undergraduate Teaching

  • Dr Norifumi Kawai, Lecturer in International Business (Department of Business and Management)
    “Norifumi is recognised for excellence in teaching, particularly on internationalisation. Students report that they feel they are being prepared to be leaders in the international business environment, not just to pass exams. Norifumi’s careful and reflective approach to teaching, evidenced in student feedback, demonstrates a strong understanding of how students from different backgrounds have different approaches and experiences of learning.”
  • Dr Dimitra Petropoulou, Lecturer in Economics (Department of Economics)
    “Dimitra receives excellent feedback from both students and staff on her teaching and she is specially praised for her interactive teaching style. She is a keen innovator with technology, making full use of clickers, quizzes and online games in and out of the classroom, and she was recently awarded a TEL (Technology-Enanced Learning) grant to further this innovation.”
  • Boidurjo (Rick) Mukhopadhyay, Associate Tutor (Department of Business and Management)
    “Rick is highly regarded by the students he teaches across a range of modules in BMEc. He makes great efforts to encourage active learning in the classroom, thinking about in-class strategies that will work for different modules and in particular using group tasks to build co-operation and confidence.”

Outstanding or Innovative Postgraduate Teaching

  • Dr Nikolaos Papanikolaou, Lecturer in Banking and Finance (Department of Business and Management)
    “Nikolaos receives wonderful comments and testimonies from MSc students. Particularly notable are his efforts to inspire students undertaking research. This, from a recent student, says it all: ‘What was a daunting prospect at start certainly transformed into a richly rewarding experience courtesy of your astute and hands-on supervision of the process’.”
  • Dr Josh Siepel, Lecturer in Management (SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit)
    “Josh receives consistently high praise from students and colleagues for his engaging, thoughtful andstimulating style of teaching. He deserves special recognition for his efforts to adapt his teaching approach to changing scale and diversity and has had great success in eliciting active participation by international students.”
  • Malgorzata (Gosia) Sulimierska, Teaching Fellow in Banking (Department of Business and Management)
    “Gosia receives extremely positive feedback from students on MSc Banking and Finance and many comment on her support to them in tackling challenging new concepts and techniques. She should be congratulated on her innovative use of technology in teaching, particular social media.”
  • Dr Mike Osborne, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance (Department of Business and Management)
    “Mike brings a wealth of industry experience to his teaching. From a recent PoT “Content was complex but rendered highly accessible, even enjoyable, and certainly very relevant to the world of finance.’ He has a very carefully thought out approach to his teaching, aiming to inject enthusiasm for learning among his students and clearly succeeding.”

Oustanding or Innovative Assessment and Feedback

  • Pedro Rosa DiasLecturer in Economics (Department of Economics)
    “Students praise Pedro warmly for demystifying economics (it is not easy to teach economics to non-economists) and statistics but Pedro has been recognised for his innovative work on assessment and feedback. Across all his modules, Pedro has a carefully designed strategy to give students feedback on their progress, using technology in the classroom, rapid feedback quizzes on SyD and self-diagnosis tools.”

Outstanding Professional Services Support for the Learning Experience of Students

  • BMEc Employer Engagement Team – Ian PiersonMarni McArthur and Jo Budd (Professional Services)
    Our Employer Engagement Team has pioneered the professional placement year at Sussex and has helped many of our own students secure placements and graduate employment. Their experience in identifying opportunities, working with employers, developing protocols and supporting faculty and students has been welcomed by other schools as they develop their own placement year.”

    Marni McArthur, Placements Co-ordinator, added:

    “We are immensely proud of receiving this award and all thoroughly enjoy supporting the largest placement cohort within the University.

    “Our work is particularly rewarding because of the relationships we have fostered with excellent colleagues across campus, employers and (of course) enthusiastic and motivated BMEc placement students.”

Prof Clare Mackie, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), said: “I am delighted that these awards allow us to celebrate teaching and learning at Sussex, which established a reputation for teaching and learning in the 1960s when it broke the mould to ‘redraw the map of learning’ – since then delivering innovative teaching, learning and student support.

“With the current pace of life, however, we often forget to reflect and celebrate the high-quality achievement in these areas.

“The University’s Excellence in Teaching Awards give us a chance to do this. These awards are richly deserved and transform the future of our students.”

Winners will receive their certificates at the next Teaching and Learning Conference.

Original Post

Sussex Celebrates Excellence in Teaching and Support staff

Sussex celebrates excellent teaching and support staff

Forty-one members of staff have been announced as winners of the University’s Excellence in Teaching Awards.

Staff and students put forward their nominations earlier in the year, after which nominees were asked to submit reflective statements evidencing how they met the criteria for the award and including feedback from colleagues and students.

School Teaching and Learning Committees reviewed the statements and agreed which of those met the criteria for award.

The full list of winners is below:

Outstanding or Innovative Undergraduate Teaching

Outstanding or Innovative Postgraduate Teaching


Oustanding or Innovative Assessment and Feedback


Outstanding Support for the Learning Experience of Students
 


Outstanding Professional Services Support for the Learning Experience of Students

Professor Clare Mackie, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), said: “I am delighted that these awards allow us to celebrate teaching and learning at Sussex, which established a reputation for teaching and learning in the 1960s when it broke the mould to ‘redraw the map of learning’ – since then delivering innovative teaching, learning and student support.

“With the current pace of life, however, we often forget to reflect and celebrate the high-quality achievement in these areas.

“The University’s Excellence in Teaching Awards give us a chance to do this.  These awards are richly deserved and transform the future of our students.”

On behalf of the BMEc Employer Engagement Team, Marni McArthur said: “We are immensely proud of receiving this award and all thoroughly enjoy supporting the largest placement cohort within the University.

“Our work is particularly rewarding because of the relationships we have fostered with excellent colleagues across campus, employers and (of course) enthusiastic and motivated BMEc placement students.”

Dr Anne-Marie Angelo was one of the winners of the award for Outstanding or Innovative Undergraduate Teaching. She said: “I’m delighted to receive this award. I very much enjoy teaching at Sussex – students here are curious, critical, and engaged.

“The innovative curricula in History and American Studies have inspired me to take creative pedagogical approaches, and to see teaching as a natural extension of my own research passions.”

Dr Kathy Romer, winner of two awards, said:I am delighted with this award, but I definitely cannot take all the credit for it: the students have come up with all the brilliant ideas, and my fabulous Associate Tutors have done a brilliant job taking absolute beginners and turning them into confident experts.”

Certificates for the Excellence in Teaching Awards will be handed out at the next Teaching and Learning Conference.

Excellence in Teaching Awards will be announced again next academic year. All staff who receive a nomination in the 2015 Student Led Teaching Awards will be invited to take part in the awards. For further details, please visit the ADQE website.

 

Original Article 

The Washington Post: Why are so many college students failing to gain job skills before graduation?

Why are so many college students failing to gain job skills before graduation?

 

If you watch college sports on television, you’ve probably seen the ad for Enterprise Rent-A-Car featuring former college athletes working behind the counter at your nearby Enterprise location. Enterprise – which hires more entry-level college graduates annually than any other company in the U.S. — likes recruiting college athletes because they know how to work on teams and multitask.

“We see a lot of transferable skills in athletes,” Marie Artim, vice president of talent acquisition at Enterprise, told me. See More Here

Taken from:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/01/26/why-are-so-many-college-students-failing-to-gain-job-skills-before-graduation/?tid=sm_fb

 

2014 Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded to Jean Tirole

2014 Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded to Jean Tirole

written by Ursula Moffitt

jean tiroleAt just after 1pm CET today, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2014 was awarded to Jean Marcel Tirole of Toulouse, France. This prize, more commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics, was given to Dr. Tirole for his extensive work on the behavior of large companies in relation to market power and regulation.

This marks the first time in over 30 years that the prize has been given to someone focusing on regulation. This topic has become increasingly relevant since the global financial crises began six years ago, and the timing of this award underscores its continued importance. Dr. Tirole’s research focuses specifically on dense mathematical models that describe and analyze markets, attempting to parse out ways to control the monopolies held by major companies. According to the Guardian, Dr. Tirole said he was grateful for the award for his work on “taming powerful firms”.

Dr. Tirole has a broad base of expertise, however, including topics in game theory, banking, finance and psychology. He is chairman of the board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, a founding member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) in Toulouse. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1981 before returning to France to take up his first research position at CERAS, École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. Since then, Dr. Tirole has worked as a professor and researcher in numerous institutions in the United States and France, including as an economics advisor to the Prime Minister from 1999 – 2006.

 

If you’re interested in reading about last year’s winner, take a look at this blog post on the 2013 Nobel Prize recipients and their work.

 

Link from

Interesting observations after reading the BIS Report

After reading new BIS’s report there are following interesting observations I could find. Firstly, for last few years centrals banks have been printing electronic money like crazy. The only effect of pumping this empty money into the economy is that the total debt increases and the creation of huge speculative bubbles in the economy. Secondly, the percentage of tax revenue allocated to the repayment of government debt rose from 20% to around 25%. And because, the last few years economic growth was with lower rate than it was expected , it only caused even bigger speculative bubbles on bonds markets and derivative instruments marks, which should be immediately pierced. Thirdly, maybe it is better now to break out this speculative bubbles and have a controlled crash. Instead of waiting until the scale of the distortion will increase, leading to a collapse of the system without of any control.
Lastly, but the most interesting and ironic question which came to my mind is who was advising for this QE monetary policy – it was not BIS or IMF which led to this policy and then again who will be winner of this control cash. As I know, in finance if one is losing someone else is winning but who this time? Already after crisis in 2008, the main effect is that there is a significant enrichment of the richest 1% of society.
More about BIS’s report: http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2014e.pdf

Working Paper: Total factor productivity estimation for the Polish manufacturing industry: A comparison of alternative methods

Working Paper Series

Our Working Paper Series (ED-WPS) features recent research output by the members of our Department as well as colleagues outside the Univeristy.

For more working papers from Economics, please visit Research Partners in Economics (RePEc), who hold an archive of  previous papers from Sussex as well as from hundreds of other universities and other institutions worldwide.

Latest paper

Total factor productivity estimation for the Polish manufacturing industry: A comparison of alternative methods

Malgorzata Sulimierska
(ED-WPS No. 67-2013) This paper is available for download: WPS-67-2014 [PDF 1.75MB]

LINK: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/economics/research/workingpapers

Top 10 questions for the PhD oral exam

Top ten questions for the PhD oral exam

A checklist of ‘viva’ issues that always come up

When you have finally finished writing a PhD dissertation or thesis, and submitted it to the university for review, you are at the end of a long period of grappling with dozens of tricky and detailed problems and issues. For instance, how to upgrade the dodgy paragraph on page 102; what the sources were for Figure 5.7; or how to best (re-)phrase your hypotheses or expectations so as to fit the research you actually did. Perhaps for some weeks after submission these kinds of concerns will buzz around your head. They may even prompt you to lie awake at night rehearsing answers to the examiners, if they should ask about why you did x at one point, instead of y.

Yet an oral examination of a doctorate (a ‘viva’ in British parlance) is rarely just an exercise in ‘Spot the problem’/ ‘Frame an answer’ mode. Many PhDers are surprised to find themselves immersed in a far more generalist (albeit still highly professional) conversation than they had initially anticipated. To prepare effectively for the big day and avoid being blind-sided you may need to change mindset a lot. The oral exam is a crucial session where you almost always need to reconnect with some fundamental themes and claims in your work. You need to think ahead to the issues that examiners often have when they read unfamiliar work, implemented in a way that is new to them. Their concerns generally revolve around: Is this legitimate innovation and focusing? Or it it instead somewhat weird? PhD examiners are guardians of the professional temple, so these issues weigh a lot with them. (These sit alongside some more prosaic concerns, like checking you really did the work yourself, and that you did all that you say you have) The opportunity to meet you in person is key to assuaging these wider concerns.

Here’s where the Top 10 list of questions below can come in useful, as a frame to encourage you to think wider and more generally about the professional conversation to come.

Value-added and originality

  • What are the most original (or value-added) parts of your thesis?
  • Which propositions or findings would you say are distinctively your own?
  • How do you think your work takes forward or develops the literature in this field?
  • What are the ‘bottom line’ conclusions of your research? How innovative or valuable are they? What does your work tell us that we did not know before?

Origins and the scope of the research

  • Can you explain how you came to choose this topic for your doctorate What was it that first interested you about it? How did the research focus change over time?
  • Why have you defined the final topic in the way you did? What were some of the difficulties you encountered and how did they influence how the topic was framed? What main problems or issues did you have in deciding what was in-scope and out-of-scope?

Methods

  • What are the core methods used in this thesis? Why did you choose this approach? In an ideal world, are there different techniques or other forms of data and evidence that you’d have liked to use?

Data or information

  • What are the main sources or kinds of evidence? Are they strong enough in terms of their quantity and quality to sustain the conclusions that you draw? Do the data or information you consider appropriately measure or relate to the theoretical concepts, or underlying social or physical phenomena, that you are interested in?

Findings

  • How do your findings fit with or contradict the rest of the literature in this field? How do you explain the differences of findings, or estimation, or interpretation between your work and that of other authors?

What next?

  • What are the main implications or lessons of your research for the future development of work in this specific sub-field? Are there any wider implications for other parts of the discipline? Do you have ‘next step’ or follow-on research projects in mind?

SOURCE

All the share available in Poland are worth the same as Time Warner.

Scarce

Investors love the promise of high returns from emerging-market equities, but there are not many of them to buy. Especially if you exclude stakes held by governments, the market capitalisation of bourses beyond the rich world is tiny. Just how tiny is apparent from the map below: in many emerging markets, the value of all the freely traded shares of firms that feature in the local MSCI share index (which typically tracks 85% of local listings) is equivalent to a single Western firm. Thus all the shares available in India are worth roughly the same as Nestlé; Egypt’s are equal to Burger King. This suggests that emerging economies need deeper, more liquid markets-and investors need more perspective.

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