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Laurent Bouton Joins Economics Faculty
We are extremely pleased to announce that Laurent Bouton will join our department as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2013. Laurent comes to us from Boston University where he was an Assistant Professor since 2009. He specializes in Political Economy, Microeconomics and Public Economics. The Chair of the Economics Department, Frank Vella, remarks "Laurent is an outstanding young scholar and he will provide additional strength in research areas where our Department is already very strong. We are all very excited to welcome him to Georgetown."
A NEWLY CREATED INITATIVE AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY TO INCUBATE AND EVALUATE EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS:.
The Initative, jointly convened by the Economics Department and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and co-directed by Billy Jack and James Habyarimana, brings together academics, innovators, policymakers and development practitioners to incubate and evaluate ideas. We harness the energy and enthusiasm of the University's undergraduate and graduate student body to contribute to these efforts at both the innovation and evaluation stages, through event participation, academic supervision, and summer and semester long field assignments. Click here to read more.
World Bank Economist to Join Georgetown Economics Faculty
November 27, 2012 – Martin Ravallion, director of the World Bank’s research department, will join Georgetown as its inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chaired Professor of Economics in the spring semester.
“The faculty [members] of the economics department are excited to welcome him as a colleague, but I anticipate that Martin's presence will be felt throughout the entire Georgetown University community,” says Francis Vella, professor and chair of economics. “This will not only be through his undergraduate and graduate teaching but also through interaction with other units across the university.”
Ravallion is well known for his scholarship on development economics. His wide-ranging research includes his early work on famines as well as his research on the causes of poverty and the evaluation of anti-poverty policies. He is probably best known for his work on measuring global poverty, including developing the international “$1-a-day" poverty measure.
In the late 1980s, World Bank economists observed that some developing countries drew their poverty lines at about $370 of income per year.
That led Ravillion to the often-used measurement, which divides $370 by 365 days.
“As an economist who has devoted almost all his professional life to using knowledge to help fight poverty in the world, moving to Georgetown University at this time makes a lot of sense,” Ravallion says.
He has held academic positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford and the Australian National University before joining the World Bank in 1988. Since then he also has held several visiting positions at institutions such as Princeton University and the Université de Toulouse in France.
The economist has published extensively and received a number of academic honors, including the 2011 John Kenneth Galbraith Award “for outstanding contributions to humanity through leadership, research and service” at the annual conference of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
Ravallion’s chair is named after Georgetown alumnus and business executive Edmond D. Villani (C’68).
“The Villanis’ extraordinary generosity, along with Ed Villani’s active involvement with the department, has been one of the major reasons for our substantial progress in the last eight years,” says Vella, the recipient of the Edmond V. Villani Chair in Economics, named after Ed Villani's father. “This involvement has resulted in important appointments … such as professors Guido Kuersteiner and John Rust, and now, Martin.”
Kuersteiner, a leading econometrician, joined the Georgetown faculty in 2010. Rust, a pioneer in structural econometrics, became a Georgetown professor this fall.
Professor Rust Joins Economics Faculty Fall 2012
The Department is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor John Rust who will be joining the Department in the Fall of 2012. John received his PhD from MIT in 1983 and has held Full Professor positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale and most recently the University of Maryland. John is a pioneer in the area of structural econometrics and his work has been acknowledged by a variety of academic awards such as an Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 1988 and the prestigious Frisch Medal. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS NEW RESEARCH INSTITUTE - GCER
We are pleased to announce the creation of GCER, the Georgetown Center for Economic Research. GCER is the newly established research institute housed within the Department of Economics and setup to foster an environment of open and rigorous scientific inquiry into current economic policy issues and problems. Go to GCER to read more about GCER's mission and activities.
MASTERS PROGRAM:
Georgetown University's Masters Degree Program in Applied Economics commenced with the Fall 2011 semester. Applications for the Fall 2013 term are now being accepted through the Graduate School website . Please click on the this link for for information about our Masters Degree Program.
GEORGETOWN ECONOMICS IN THE NEWS
EMPOWERMENT THROUGH ECONOMICS
October 9, 2012—Four Georgetown students spent their summer in Kenya and learned how they could apply their economics skills to real world challenges.
Associate Professor of Economics Billy Jack has conducted extensive research in eastern Africa, particularly in Kenya. This summer, he sent Yun Ling, Lucie Parker, and Alec Villec, undergraduate College students, and Cindy Yang (F’12) to Nairobi to work on his current field projects. “We saw three projects in three different phases,” Alex Villec (C’13), an economics and government major, explained. Over the two months, the students saw how their economics knowledge could apply to a range of topics from road safety and maternal health savings to financial literacy for Kenyan teens. (click here to read more)
September 10, 2012—Baker scholar Weiheng Zhang (C’13) roots many of his professional goals in the development of his native China. An economics major, he is dedicated to understanding the country from a financial perspective—its history as well as its present and future needs. (click here to read more)
