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Welcome to the inaugural Newsletter of the Georgetown Center for Economic Research (GCER). Housed within the Department of Economics, GCER is setup to foster an environment of open and rigorous scientific inquiry into current economic policy issues and problems, and to communicate its findings to academics and policy makers. 

Go to GCER to read more about our mission and activities.

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This Spring, David Card, the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, will present the 2012 Razin Policy Lecture at Georgetown University. The Razin Lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 3:30 pm in the BSB 490 Fisher Colloquium.

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The Georgetown Department of Economics and Center for Economic Research is very pleased to announce that John Rust will be joining the department in the Fall of 2012 as Professor and GCER Faculty Fellow. Rust will be moving over to Georgetown from the University of Maryland where he has resided as Professor of Economics since 2001.

Rust's research is internationally renowned, and spans both the technical frontier and the practical side of economics.

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Georgetown Department of Economics and Center for Economic Research welcomes its newest member, Pedro Carneiro who now joins the Department and GCER in the Fall of 2011. Carneiro arrives from University College London where he currently holds the rank of Reader, and will hold the rank of Associate Professor at Georgetown.

Carneiro comes to GCER with an outstanding record of scholarship and expertise in the areas of labor economics and applied microeconometrics.

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In a new article for the Georgetown College News, GCER Fellow Luca Flabbi discusses his recent work on wage inequality between men and women in the workplace. The article highlights much of Flabbi's recent research on hiring practices, job and wage inequality, and the effects of job search and bargaining in the U.S. labor market.

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Children are sources of costs and benefits, both monetary and non-monetary. For these reasons economists have studied children as "assets" since the path-breaking work of Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker. However, GCER Faculty Fellow Pedro Gete (pictured here) and co-author Paolo Porchia claim in their recent paper   "Fertility and Consumption when Having a Child is a Risky Investment"   that the fertility literature is missing an important element: children are risky assets.

Gete and Porchia develop a model in which the decision to have a child is comparable to the decision to exercise a financial option, since the risk of children comes from a variety sources. To prove their model, they establish several new theoretical results:

• Higher cost volatility diminishes fertility and consumption.
• Risk aversion speeds up fertility and lowers consumption.
• Fertility is increasing in the correlation between income and child cost shocks.
• The sign of the correlation determines whether higher income volatility speeds up or delays fertility, although the effect decays with risk aversion.

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Our PhD program is and will remain the hub of intellectual activity and advancement here at Georgetown.

This year three of students enter the academic job market from Georgetown.

• Jorge Fernandez specializes in IO and Game Theory. His job market paper studies a dynamic contracting model where investment is used as a dynamic screening device by entrepreneurs.
• David Phillips specializes in labor and development. His job market paper examines a field experiment in which transportation subsidies can mitigate the inefficiencies resulting from spatial mismatch between jobs and applicants.
• James Stavely O’Carroll specializes in International Financial Markets. His job market paper identifies trends in financial data from a study of portfolio choice in a multi-country model with a banking sector.

David Phillips, in particular, won the fifteenth edition of the Razin Prize. Congratulations to David and his advisor, Professor William Jack. The Razin Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student research paper, in memory of Ofair Razin. Its award coincides with the Razin Economic Policy Lecture, which this year will be delivered by David Card (Berkeley) on April 17th.

The PhD program is also adding a brand new field of specialization: “Empirical Micro.” The first class in a sequence of two will be taught by Pedro Carniero in the Spring of 2012. The second part of the new sequence will be taught by John Rust in the Fall of 2012.

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The Economics Department at Georgetown University now offers a Masters Degree in Applied Economics. The Applied Economics Program commenced classes in Fall 2011, and it is currently accepting applications through the Graduate School Website for the Fall 2012 semester.

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The department is continuing to reach out to our undergraduate student body and to engage them in a variety of ways.  We have initiated a Facebook Group called "Guugle" (Georgetown University Under-Graduates who Like Economics), open to all faculty and students majoring in either Economics or Political Economy.  This site is used as a forum to informally share research and policy discussions, to inform our majors about internships and job opportunities, and in general to facilitate more interaction between faculty and students.

Feel free to visit us at Facebook.

We also continue to expand our offerings of 400-level courses.  Currently we expect to offer 15 this academic year, including a new course on program evaluation being taught by Professor Garance Genicot.  And a particularly popular class, given current macroeconomic developments, is Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, taught by Professor Dan Cao.

To all Economics Graduate Alums: you can keep in touch via the Alumni Facebook page or subscribe to updates on blogspot.
 

For more information, contact Yamin Ahmad

GCER's activities are funded by a variety of sources, including contributions. Your generous contribution helps the Center to advance its mission of research excellence. To make a donation, please visit the Georgetown College's Gifting On-line web site  and fill out the on-line form. Under the heading "Direct your gift,"  specify "Other". In the line that appears directly below, type "Georgetown Center for Economic Research (GCER)".  Thank you for your support.