RICE ECON
Fall 2016
News and Views from the Economics Department at Rice
Meet Our New Assistant Professors!
This semester we welcome four new assistant professors to the Economics Department,
hired as part of the ongoing RISE (Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics) program
to enhance teaching and research in Economics at Rice. All four will be teaching in the
undergraduate program this academic year.
Rossella
Calvi received
her PhD from
Boston College in
2016. Her areas
of expertise are
development
economics,
applied microeconomics, and labor. Her
research focuses on issues related to gender inequality, poverty, health and education in developing countries. She is also
interested in economic history and studies
the role that historical institutions play
in determining contemporary outcomes.
She is teaching our course in Economic
Development (ECON 450) this semester
and again in the spring.
Yunmi Kong
received her
Ph.D. from New
York University
in 2016, and
worked previously as an
analyst with J. P.
Morgan Treasury and Securities Services.
Her research interests include empirical industrial organization and applied
microeconometrics and microeconomics.
Her latest work focuses on the empirical
analysis of auctions, including a recent
analysis of the leasing of oil and gas tracts.
This semester she is teaching both sections
of Applied Econometrics (ECON 209).
Yinghua He
received his Ph.D.
from Columbia
University in 2011
and before coming
to Rice was an
assistant professor
at the Toulouse
School of Economics. His research focuses on issues in applied microeconomics,
labor, and education. Some of his recent
work looks at theoretical and empirical
issues in market design, including analyses of school choice programs in Beijing
and Paris. He will teach both sections of
Applied Econometrics (ECON 209) in
the spring.
Mallesh Pai
received his
Ph.D. from
Northwestern
University in
2010 and previously was an
assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania; he
has also worked at Google and Microsoft.
His research focuses on issues in mechanism design and auction theory, the
economics of privacy, social networks/
social learning (he has a paper on whether
online social networks increase economic
welfare) and statistical decision theory.
This semester he is “importing” from Penn
his highly successful course in Market
Design (ECON 470).
Economics Department
Chair Named New Dean
of Social Sciences
We are delighted to report that over the
summer, former Economics Department
Chair Antonio Merlo was named the new
Dean of the School of Social Sciences,
becoming the first member of the department to serve in this capacity. Professor
Merlo, who previously held positions
at the University of Pennsylvania, the
University of Minnesota, and New York
University, came to Rice two years ago.
During his short but extremely productive tenure as department chair, the Rice
Initiative for the Study of Economics
(RISE) was created, the department hired
five additional internationally renowned
senior faculty and four highly regarded
new assistant professors (check out their
short bios on the left), designed and implemented a comprehensive restructuring
of both the undergraduate and graduate
economics programs, and created a new
Masters in Energy Economics program. Dean Merlo will continue serving
as Director of RISE and teaching his popular course in political economy (ECON
432). In his stead, Professor Hülya
Eraslan was appointed interim Economics
Department Chair for the 2016-2017 academic year; for more on Professor Eraslan,
see page 3.
Advising Corner
Fall 2016 Advising Office Hours
Monday
3:30–5:00pm — James Brown, BKH 250
Tuesday
12:30–2:00pm — George Zodrow, BKH 260
Friday
1:00–2:30pm — Peter Hartley, BKH 262
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