News
On 11th May, Professor Pierre-Richard Agénor will participate in a panel discussion organized during the 14th edition of the Annual Inflation Targeting Seminar of the Central Bank of Brazil. The Discussion will focus on Macroeconomic and Financial Stability. Other members of the panel will include Stephen G. Cecchetti (Chief Economist of the Bank for International Settlements) and Thomas J. Jordan (Chairman of the Governning Board of the Swiss National Bank). An outline of the conference programme
Manchester Economists Contribute to Research on Campylobacter
Sources, Seasonality, Transmission and Control: Campylobacter and human behaviour in a changing environment
This is a 5-year, £4m project joint with Liverpool, Lancaster, Newcastle and UEA: the Social Science component comprises Professors Rachel Griffith and Dan Rigby of the Economics discipline area at Manchester.
Research will include estimating current costs of Campylobacter* related illness, assessing the relative roles of transmission via direct environmental contact versus contaminated food, the costs and acceptability of interventions to reduce risk, risk perceptions etc.
The project is funded under the Environmental and Social Ecology of Human Infectious Diseases (ESEI) programme, a joint initiative between the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of the Living With Environmental Change programme.
* Campylobacter is the most common bacterial cause of diarrhoeal disease in the developed world, and caused an estimated 700,000 cases of illness in the UK in 2010 with c.200 deaths. The costs of Campylobacter-related illness exceed those from Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli combined
Manchester Economics ranked 7th in UK
The latest World University Rankings confirm the continuing rise in the international status of Economics at Manchester.
Manchester Students win Economics Network award
The Economics Network, as part of an HE Academy initiative with additional sponsorship from Baillie Gifford and PricewaterhouseCooper, ran a competition for economics students at the beginning of 2011. Students were asked to submit entries in any format on the topic "Why Study Economics @ University?"
22 submissions were received, which included creative essays, songs, poems and videos and two Manchester undergraduates Daniel Derbyshire (BA Econ) and Alex Grindulis (PPE) won the second prize. The winning entries are to be found on the Why Study Economics website.
On graduation day, Daniel and Alex were presented with their certificates (see photo)
Manchester Economist wins FP7 funding on biodiversity policy
Professor Ada Wossink and a team of collaborators across Europe have secured fuding under the FP7 funding stream.
The European Commission has agreed to fund a project into the analysis of alternative ways to improve biodiversity policy making and governance at local, national and global scales.
The project – involving The University of Manchester and seven partner institutions – aims at an improved comprehension of the utility of the concept of value of biodiversity. The project is interdisciplinary across the social sciences and combines insights from psychology with those from philosophy and environmental economics. The problem addressed by the project is that in spite of the large economic values calculated for ecosystem services, politicians and the public in general in Europe do not appear to respond swiftly and effectively to prevent further biodiversity degradation. The project addresses why this is and what could work to motivate to act on biodiversity.
The FP7 collaborative project is "Motivational strength of ecosystem services and alternative ways to express the value of biodiversity” (Acronym: BIOMOT). The 8-partner project is coordinated by Radboud University of Nijmegen. The project is carried out over 4 years starting Sept, 2011 with a total project funding of over 3 million Euro. The funding secured for Manchester is close to half a million Euro.
Funding for Stochastic Dynamics Research Programme
Professor Igor Evstigneev has been funded to pursue a research programme in "Stochastic Dynamics in Economics and Finance" at the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. He organises this programme together with Rabah Amir and Klaus Schenk-Hoppé. The programme will take place in May - August 2013.
The Hausdorff Institute is an international visitor research centre. It runs programs in "all areas of mathematics and mathematical economics". During a Trimester programme, which lasts four months, the Institute invites a group of researchers from all over the world to work on topics related to the central theme of the Trimester. The Institute can host up to 30 scholars at any time and tries to distribute these places between senior researchers, Postdocs and PhD students.
The focus of the Stochastic Dynamics programme will be on new approaches to modelling market dynamics and equilibrium, with the emphasis on behavioural approaches, that constitute a core component of the Economics DA research strategy. In the framework of this programme, three workshops will be organised: on stochastic optimization, stochastic dynamic games and evolutionary modelling. The Trimester will be concluded with the conference "Modelling Market Dynamics and Equilibrium: New Challenges, New Horizons."
Paul Fisher, Bank of England, gives widely reported speech at Manchester Economics Seminar
Paul Fisher – Executive Director Markets and member of the Monetary Policy Committee – explained how the Bank uses its sterling monetary operations to help meet its two core purposes: maintaining monetary stability and contributing to the stability of the financial system. The full text of the speech is available on the Bank's news pages.
Ed Prescott visits Economics DA
Nobel Laureate Ed Prescott presented a special Manchester Economics Seminar on Tuesday 15th March. This was the culmination of a two day visit to Manchester by Professor Prescott who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Finn Kydland in 2004. Full details of his Nobel award.
Manchester Economist's Research has Impact on Finnish Electricity Regulation
The Finnish Energy Market Authority has recently published a report (in Finnish) where they outline the plans and changes to the government regulation of the electricity distribution companies in Finland in the next four-year period (2012-2015). The report proposes a number of major reforms to the existing regulatory model. One of the main recommendations is to replace the earlier used statistical method to estimate cost efficiency of the distribution firms with the new method called Stochastic Non-Parametric Envelopment of Data (StoNED). This method was recently proposed and developed by Timo Kuosmanen (Aalto University) and Mika Kortelainen (Univ.of Manchester) in their forthcoming article in Journal of Productivity Analysis (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n7113756n27n4250/). Besides Finland, the new method has also received interest from the regulatory agencies in other countries.
The regulation of the energy distribution firms is one of the few areas where tools and techniques of productive efficiency analysis have been applied to the real-world decisions with major economic impacts. For example, the Finnish electricity distribution firms had the total turnover of 1.68 Billion Euro in 2008. Since one percent error in the efficiency estimate can cost Millions of Euro, it is important to use the most advanced techniques in the cost efficiency estimation.
Teaching Excellence Awards
Two of our colleagues have been honoured with awards for their teaching.
Ralf Becker has won the University of Manchester's Teaching Excellence Award. This is awarded to colleagues who have demonstrated a significant and sustained commitment to excellence in teaching, excellence in supporting teaching, or shown significant and successful innovation. Ralf's award reflected his work across a wide range of activities which enhance the student experience at Manchester. Ralf, whose teaching is always highly rated by his students, developed the use of a Peer Assisted Study Scheme (PASS) on one of his modules, and has been instrumental in developing the teaching of econometric software at Manchester. In addition Ralf has conducted research on student perceptions of the delivery of teaching in the School of Social Sciences and edits the Economics student newsletter.
Ken Clark has won the Economics Network e-Learning Award for his work on using wikis as a collaborative tool to facilitate assessed groupwork in a third year optional module. This project embedded feedback in the assessment process and aimed to expose students to the kinds of Web 2.0 technology that they will increasingly require in the workplace. Some materials, including a video of Ken discussing the project, are available at Ken's personal webpage.
Appointments
The Economics DA welcomed 5 new members of staff at the start of this academic year:
James and Rachel joined us from UCL and both hold joint appointments between Manchester and IFS.
Jit is a lecturer in Environmental Economics.
Carlo and Stefania both joined us from York and are teaching-focused lecturers.
We are very pleased to have them all at Manchester.
Research news
Rachel Griffith
- Appointed Editor of the Economic Journal from 1 April 2011
- Appointed to sub-panel 18: Economics and Econometrics in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF)
- Programme Chair of the 2011 Royal Economic Society Annual Conference
- Elected Fellow of the British Academy
- Executive Committee Member, European Economic Association, 2005-2011
- ERC Advanced Grant (2010-2015), £1.6m, on "Microeconomic Analysis of Prices, Food and Nutrition"
Johannes Sauer
- Appointed as Associate Editor (Editorial Board Member), Journal of Productivity Analysis, (10/2010 on)
- Invited Panel Member, Scottish Government Centre for Expertise on Water, 2010/11
Horst Zank
- Appointed Visiting Professor of Behavioural Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, NL (for 1 year).
- Appointed Member of the ESRC Peer Review College.
- Appointed as member of the Programme Committee to the Royal Economic Society Meeting 2011.
- Appointed to the Advisory Editorial Board of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.
Igor Evstigneev
- Invited to the Institute for Mathematical Sciences of the National University of Singapore and participate as an invited speaker in the "Workshop on the Probabilistic Impulse behind Modern Economic Theory"
Papers and publications
Pierre-Richard Agénor, "Schooling and Public Capital in a Model of Endogenous Growth" is forthcoming in Economica.
Pierre-Richard Agénor, "The Allocation of Public Expenditure and Economic Growth" (with Kyriakos Neanidis), Manchester School, Forthcoming.
Pierre-Richard Agénor, "Cyclical Effects of Bank Capital Requirements with Imperfect Credit Markets," (with L. Pereira da Silva) forthcoming in Journal of Financial Stability.
Becker, R. and D. Osborn (2010) Weighted smooth transition regressions (2010), to appear in: Journal of Applied Econometrics
Becker, R., A.E. Clements and S. Hurn (2010) Semi-Parametric Forecasting of Realized Volatility (2010) to appear in: Studies of Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics.
Acemoglu, D., P. Aghion, R. Griffith and F. Zilibotti. "Vertical Integration and Technology: Theory and Evidence." Journal of the European Economic Association 8, no. 5 (2010): 989-1033.
Michele Berardi, "Should Monetary Policy Respond to Private Sector Expectations?", in Cappello, M., Rizzo, C. (editors), Central Banking and Globalization, Nova Publishers, 2010, forthcoming.
Keith Blackburn, "Financial liberalisation, bureaucratic corruption and economic development" (Journal of International Money and Finance)
Keith Blackburn, "Public expenditures, bureaucratic corruption and economic development" (co-authored with N. Bose and M.E. Haque) in The Manchester School.
Keith Blackburn and Gonzalo Forgues-Puccio, "Why is corruption less harmful in some countries than in others?" is forthcoming in Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation.
Igor Evstigneev, "Linearization and local stability of random dynamical systems," (with K.R. Schenk-Hoppé and S.A. Pirogov) is forthcoming in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.
John M. Fry Regression: Linear Models in Statistics, (jointly with N.H. Bingham) is forthcoming in Springer, Undergraduate Mathematics Series.
Alastair Hall and D. Pelletier (2010) NOn-nested testing in models estimated via Generalized Method of Moments, accepted for publication in Econometric Theory.
Alastair Hall "Generalized Method of Moments," accepted for publication in Volume on Financial Econometrics (Ole Barndorff-Nielsen and Eric Renault eds.) in the Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance.
Roger Hartley "Risk aversion in symmetric and asymmetric contests," joint paper with Richard Cornes , is forthcoming in Economic Theory.
Katsushi Imai 'Fiscal Stimulus, Agricultural Growth and Poverty in Asia' (with R. Gaiha, G. Thapa and W. Kang) forthcoming in World Economy.
Katsushi Imai ‘Poverty Dynamics and Vulnerability in Vietnam,’ (with Raghav Gaiha and Woojin Kang), Applied Economics, 43(25), pp. 3603-3618, 011.
Katsushi Imai "'Decentralisation, democracy and allocation of poverty alleviation programmes in rural India" (with T. Sato), forthcoming in European Journal of Development Research.
Katsushi Imai "Poverty, undernutrition and vulnerability in rural India: Role of rural public works and food for work programmes", forthcoming in International Review of Applied Economics, 25(5), September 2011.
Katsushi Imai "Supply Response to Changes in Agricultural Commodity Prices in Asian Countries" (with R. Gaiha and G. Thapa),Journal of Asian Economics, 22(1), February 2011, pp. 61-75.
Katsushi Imai "Poverty, Inequality and Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam," (with Raghav Gaiha and Woojin Kang),International Review of Applied Economics, 25(3), pp.249-282, May 2011.
Kyriakos Neanidis "Business Cycle Synchronization of the Euro Area with the New and Negotiating Member Countries" is forthcoming in the International Journal of Finance and Economics (jointly authored with Denise Osborn and Christos Savva).
Kyriakos Neanidis "Humanitarian Aid, Fertility, and Economic Growth", Economica.
Kyriakos Neanidis "The Allocation of Public Expenditure and Economic Growth" (with Pierre-Richard Agénor), Manchester School, Forthcoming.
Kyriakos Neanidis "Financial Dollarization and European Union Membership", International Finance, Forthcoming.
Denise Osborn "Business Cycle Synchronization of the Euro Area with the New and Negotiating Member Countries" (jointly authored with Kyriakos Neanidis and Christos Savva) is forthcoming in the International Journal of Finance and Economics.
Denise Osborn "Co-movements Between US and UK Stock Prices: The Role of Time-varying Conditional Correlations," (with Nektarios Aslanidis, Marianne Sensier) International Journal of Finance and Economics, Early View.
Robert Routledge "Bertrand Competition with Cost Uncertainty" is forthcoming in Economics Letters.
Johannes Sauer, "Deregulation and Dairy Production Systems - A Bayesian Distance Function Approach" forthcoming in Journal of Productivity Analysis
Johannes Sauer,"Innovation and Integration in the Agri-Food Industry"
(with K.Karantininis and H.Furtan) forthcoming in Food Policy
Johannes Sauer,"The Performance of Water Utilities in Jordan" (with Tamer Al-Assad) forthcoming in Water Science and Technology
Johannes Sauer,"Social Capital and the Performance of Water User Associations" (with M. Gorton) forthcoming in German Journal of Agricultural Economics
Johannes Sauer "Water Communities in the Republic of Macedonia: An Empirical Analysis of Membership Satisfaction and Payment Behaviour," (with M. Gorton) is forthcoming in World Development.
Xiaobing Wang "Poverty and Vulnerability in Rural China: Effects of Taxation," (with Katsushi Imai and Woojin Kang) forthcoming in Journal of Chinese Economy and Business.
Zank, Horst (2010) "Consistent Probability Attitudes," Economic Theory 44, 167-185.
Abdellaoui, Mohammed, Olivier l’Haridon and Horst Zank (2010) “Separating Curvature and Elevation: A Parametric Probability Weighting Function,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 41, 39-65.