Latest Economics News

2023

• Associate Professor Andrew Jalil’s study, “Eating to save the planet:  Evidence from a randomized controlled trial using individual-level food purchase data,” appears on a list of the most cited articles in the journal Food Policy.
• 18 students and Professor Jason Wong went to Germany as a part of ECON 312 (Political Economy of Sustainable Development: Case of Germany). The course began as an on-campus seminar in Spring 2021. After that, students spent three weeks traveling across Germany to learn about the country's political and economic structures, as well as environmental and sustainability topics.
• This year's recipients of the Economics Department's awards are Ruth Schlosser (Bennett Schwartz Award and Jim Halstead Award), Ansel Jeffries (Robby Moore Award), and Ashley Muranaka-Toolsie (Betty Tracy Award). Award descriptions can be found here. 
• Associate Professor Andrew Jalil and his coauthors published their new study, examining the effectiveness of an intervention to shift consumers towards more sustainable food choices, in Nature Food, one of the Nature journals.
• Assistant Professor Jorgen Harris, along with coauthor Rhiannon Jerch, released a working paper with the Center for Growth and Opportunity. They examine the effect of receiving Temporary Protected Status on formerly undocumented immigrants, finding that legal immigration status led to sustained improvements in income, job quality, and homeownership.
• Associate Professor Jesse Mora and Economics Major Mary Hancock’s research paper “The Impact of COVID-19 on Chinese trade and production: An empirical analysis of processing trade with Japan and the US” was published in the Journal of Asian Economics. Mary is the first Oxy student to publish a peer-reviewed academic paper with an Econ professor.
• Assistant Professor Kevin William’s article "Foreign Students in College and the Supply of STEM Graduates" was published in the Journal of Labor Economics.
• Assistant Professor Jesse Mora was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.
• Economics majors Aidan Garagic ’22 and Layla Devlin ’23 have been named as Occidental’s 2023-24 student Fulbright semi-finalists.
• Associate Professor of Economics Andrew Jalil’s research on banking panics is cited in Christina Romer’s presidential address at the American Economics Association.
• Economics alum Gail Ginell ’79 received the 2023 Alumni Seal Awards from the Occidental College Alumni Association.

2022

• A team of six Oxy students, including Andrew Masciarelli - an Economics major, Stephanie Enriquez Isais, Roshni Edwards, Dylan Herbert, Oscar Petter, and Peyton Resto, won third place in the Global Circular Challenge 2022 held at the London School of Economics on Dec 3 2022. Team Oxy was led by Economics Professor Jason Wong and supported by the Bennett Schwartz Fund.
• Project management techniques are important for the successful completion of large projects. Associate Professor of Economics Daryl Ono’s  new article  in the Journal of Cost Analysis & Parametrics shows that microeconomic tools can be implemented to improve the probability of success of a project. “A Continuance of Marginal Cost Methodology in Project Change Management” uses statistical analysis to illustrate the effectiveness of this methodology.
• Associate Professor of Economics Andrew Jalil appeared on California’s KCRW to discuss rising inflation in the United States. Professor Jalil explained that the Federal Reserve is striving for a “Goldilocks moment,” where they raise interest rates enough to slow inflation but not so much as to provoke a recession.
• The Economics Department's work in the 2021-2022 academic year to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion is summarized in the year-end report.
• Assistant Professor of Economics Jorgen Harris published "Male judges are more likely to hire women as clerks after working with female judges" in The Conversation describing his research on gender and employment in the judiciary. The article highlights a  paper  by Harris and his coauthors, published in the Journal of Labor Economics.
• Woody Studenmund, Laurence de Rycke Professor of Economics, retires after 52 years at Oxy.
• Professor of Economics Lesley Chiou was awarded the 2022 Antitrust Writing Awards by Concurrences Review for her article with co-author Avigail Kifer, "Free Can Make Cents: How to Think About 'Free' in Competitive Markets." The article examines when firms may offer products priced for free and how do firms compete in markets where prices are set to zero?
• Associate Professor of Economics Andrew Jalil was interviewed by Marketplace about the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate hikes and the likelihood of recession.
• Assistant Professor of Economics Jorgen Harris   has a new article in Labour Economics! In “Do Wages Fall when Women Enter an Occupation?”, Professor Harris finds that increases in women's work and education in the second half of the 20th century led to big changes in women’s representation in many high-education occupations. 
• Using a randomized control trial in India, Assistant Professor of Economics Jason Wong and co-authors find that vouchers of equal value increase household willingness to pay for solar lanterns more than cash transfers and microfinance schemes. “Increasing microsolar technology adoption: Efficacy of vouchers, cash transfers, and microfinance,” published in Energy Economics, demonstrates that affordability is a prime obstacle and supports the use of voucher-like incentive programs to encourage transitional technologies.
• Assistant Professor of Economics Jesse Mora’s new article in Empirical Economics takes a new approach to defining how country-level exports grow. “Export Growth Drivers and Economic Development” shows that country-level export growth will depend on five growth drivers (comparative advantage changes, product demand growth, country-level growth, global growth, and growth in destinations reached).
• Catlin Hedeman '21 publishes her honors thesis "The Effects of Increased Access to Mail-In and Absentee Voting Due to COVID-19 on Voter Turnout in the 2020 Presidential Election" in the Undergraduate Economic Review.

2021

• In a new article in Energy Economics, Jason Wong and co-authors use a conjoint experiment to study electricity billing preferences in India. They find that respondents prefer consumption-based tariffs as opposed to fixed fees, and suggest that policy reforms should transition away from fixed fee schemes. 
• Jorgen Harris and Mary Lopez are awarded a major research grant by the Haynes Foundation that will support research examining the effect of a recent expansion of college courses offered in prison on the lives of incarcerated students.
• The Economics Department's work in the 2020-2021 academic year to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion is summarized in the year-end report. 
• Diana Ngo is honored as a recipient the Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize.
• Brandon Lehr publishes a new textbook, Behavioral Economics: Evidence, Theory, and Welfare (Routledge).
• Andrew Jalil publishes “Changing Hearts and Plates” in Frontiers in Psychology.
• Senior Jordan Walker '21 receives prestigious Luce Scholarship. Jordan Walker is Occidental College’s 18th Luce Scholar since the program was initiated in 1974. Through the award, he will be placed in a major Asian city, connected to important institutions and people in his areas of interest, and given a year of financial and administrative support to cultivate his career.
• In a new article, "Perceptions and acceptability of electricity theft: Towards better public service provision", Economics Prof. Jason Wong and co-authors study perceptions and acceptability of electricity theft using a large-scale survey experiment in Uttar Pradesh, India. They showed that there exists a sense of social reprimand for stealing power, however, desired punishment is nuanced and context-dependent.

2020

• Emeritus Professors Jim Whitney and Robby Moore and former Oxy administrator and UEP Prof. Hanna Song, publish "Do Students Discriminate? Exploring Differentials by Race and Sex in Class Enrollments and Student Ratings of Instructors," in the Eastern Economic Journal.
• Jason Wong, an environmental and urban economist, joins the economics department. 
• Andrew Jalil publishes "Eating to save the planet: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial using individual-level food purchase data" in Food Policy.
• Kayla Hreczuck '21, Eva Ma '22, Luca Van der Meer '22, and Zhichao Yu '21 present their summer research at Oxy's Annual Undergraduate Research Conference.
• The Economics Department has created working groups that will identify and initiate departmental practices that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• The Economics Department has issued a statement of support and solidarity in the fight against anti-Blackness.
• A new study by Lesley Chiou and Catherine E. Tucker (MIT) has found that regions with low-income populations and low Internet penetration are less likely to follow safe-at-home orders and are thus more vulnerable to the COVID-19 coronavirus.
• Linnea Dewees ’14, an economics major from Tampa, Fla., who is teaching in Thailand is an Occidental 2019-20 Fulbright winner.

2019

• Diana Ngo is a co-PI on a NSF $493,000 major research instrumentation award to purchase a high-performance computer cluster to support faculty research and teaching across the scientific disciplines. 
• Kevin Williams publishes "Academic Achievement Across the Day: Evidence from Randomized Class Schedules" in the Economics of Education Review.
• Jorgen Harris, a labor economist, joins the economics department.  Wafa Abedin '21, Reese Ingraham '20, Jordan Walker '21, and Mary Zhang '21 present their summer research at Oxy's 20th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference.
• Bevin Ashenmiller is interviewed by reporter Sarah Gonzalez for an episode of NPR’s podcast “Planet Money” on the economics of recycling.
• Robby Moore retires after 41 years at Oxy. Economics majors from Oxy's Blyth Fund team take second place in Stanford Finance’s Stock Pitch Championship, which attracts teams from across the country.
• Lesley Chiou is invited by the Federal Communications Commission to present her research on the effects of Internet diffusion on pricing and competition in offline markets. 
• Diana Ngo publishes “Commuting to educational opportunity? School choice effects of mass transit expansion in Mexico City” (joint with Andrew Dustan) in the Economics of Education Review.

2018

• The Federal Trade Commission invites Lesley Chiou as a panelist for its Public Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. 
• Brandon Lehr is awarded the Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize.
• Kevin M. Williams, an education economist, joins the economics department.
• Nelson Rayl '19 and Andrew McCall '19 present their summer research at Oxy's 19th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference.
• The Economics Department is profiled in "Economies of Scale" from the Summer 2018 Oxy Magazine.
• Diana Ngo publishes "A theory-based living standards index for measuring poverty in developing countries" in the Journal of Development Economics. 
• Jesse Mora publishes “Firms in International Trade” (joint with Alan Spearot and Federico Diez) in the Handbook of International Trade and Transportation.
• Mary Lopez publishes her new book (joint with Dolores Trevizo), Neighborhood Poverty and Segregation in the (Re-)Production of Disadvantage: Mexican Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles.
• Kirsten Wandschneider is appointed as a Research Fellow in the Economic History Program at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).