News Archive: 2012

Nov 5, 2012
Prominent Development Economist to inaugurate Edmond D. Villani Chair in Economics.

Martin Ravallion

The Georgetown Department of Economics and the Georgetown Center for Economic Research are very pleased to announce that Martin Ravallion will be joining the Department and GCER in January 2013 as the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chaired Professor in Economics. Professor Ravallion will be moving to Georgetown from the World Bank where he currently holds the position of Director of the Development Research Group.

With nearly 300 publications, Professor Ravallion is one of the most prominent development economists in the world. His work has led to new ways of thinking about economic decisions and empirical regularities in development.

Professor Ravallion’s research is wide-ranging. His early work on the 1974 famine in Bangladesh explained and documented the various economic and political forces that led to sharply increasing rice prices and later to widespread famine. His work would eventually become a companion to the theory of famines developed around the same time by future Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Ravallion would later develop usable indicators of poverty, including the now famous “dollar-a-day” poverty line, and explore the role of limited commitment in the ability of informally organized groups to provide their members with insurance. More recently, Ravallion has written extensively on China and India, assessing the links between growth and poverty reduction in the two countries.

Much of Professor Ravallion’s work is now standard reading for students in development economics. Both the empirical measures and the theories he developed form the basis of countless studies over the past two decades.

Martin Ravallion received his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1981. He went on to hold positions at Oxford University and the Australian National University, before joining the World Bank in 1988. As current Director of the Development Research Group, he manages and supervises a staff that shapes and executes the Bank’s research agenda and provides expertise to policy makers at the highest levels. Professor Ravallion has held visiting positions at numerous institutions including Princeton, Toulouse, Warwick, the Australian National University, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, and Gadja Mada University in Indonesia.

May 20, 2012
GU Econ PhD student receives prestigious Jordan Award.

The Economic Club of Washington presented its prestigious Vernon E. Jordan Jr Fellowship Award this year to GU PhD student Mauricio Villamizar. The award was given to Mr. Villamizar in recognition for his essay “Identifying the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from Colombia.” Mr. Villamizar, a fourth year student in the GU PhD program, completed his paper under the guidance of advisor and GCER Fellow Guido Kuersteiner. The award ceremony took place at an Economic Club luncheon on May 16 at the Grand Hyatt featuring Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank.

Apr 4, 2012
The upcoming 2012 Razin Policy Lecture to be delivered by David Card.

The 2012 Razin Policy Lecture will be delivered by David Card, the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. This year’s Razin Lecture is entitled “Social Interactions” and takes place on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 4:00 pm in the BSB 490 Fisher Colloquium at Georgetown University.

Professor Card was honored by the American Economic Association in 1995 with the John Bates Clark Medal. More he received the Frisch Medal in 2007 for the outstanding research paper (with D. Hyslop) published in Econometrica in 2005, and the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2006, from Germany’s Institute for the Study of Labor, the leading award for labor economists. David Card’s research spans a wide range of issues and problems in labor economics. He research topics include the effect of minimum wage, the impacts of immigration, the consequences of racial segregation, and the effects policy changes on health insurance utilization and on health. Card’s most recent work studies peer effects and inequality in the workplace.

The Razin Lecture is accompanied by the awarding of the Razin Prize for best research paper by an advanced graduate student. This year’s prize goes to David Phillips (pictured at right) for his essay, “Getting to Work: Experimental Evidence on Job Search and Transportation Costs,” produced under the guidance of Prof. William Jack. Click here for more on the Razin Prize and Policy Lecture, its background and history.