Research & Areas of Expertise

Economics department faculty offer expertise in a variety of topics, including industrial organization, labor economics, game theory, health economics, econometrics, public finance, and urban and regional economics.

Outside the classroom, economics faculty are frequent presenters at national and international conferences, and several faculty have been recognized with national awards, fellowships and grants. Many have or currently serve on editorial boards of renowned economics journals.

Economics faculty maintain active research agendas, and their research has appeared in top general economics journals and field journals, including:

  • Econometrica
  • American Economic Review
  • Journal of Econometrics
  • European Economic Review
  • Review of Economics and Statistics
  • Industrial and Labor Relations Review
  • Journal of Human Resources
  • Journal of Urban Economics
  • Games and Economics Behavior
  • Journal of Public Economics
  • Journal of Applied Econometrics

Fall 2023

  • Associate professor Iryna Topolyan, PhD, and had her coauthored paper "Correlated Play in Weakest-Link and Best-Shot Group Contests," accepted for publication in the Journal of Mathematical Economics.
  • Professor Rene Saran, PhD, had his coauthored paper “(In)efficiency in Private Value Bargaining with Naive Players: Theory and Experiment,” accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
  • Associate professor Lenisa Chang, PhD, economics doctoral student Ian Bryant, and their coauthors had their paper “Service Trends among Non-Obstetrics/Gynecology Providers in the U.S.: Long-acting Reversible Contraception Insertions, Removals, and Re-insertions" accepted in the journal Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare.
  • Assistant professor Michael Jones, PhD, information systems doctoral student Truong (Jack) Luu, and Associate Professor of Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems Binny Samuel, PhD, published a paper titled “Measuring Crypto Literacy.”
  • Professor Jeffrey Mills, PhD, had his coauthored paper, “Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Pediatric Patients with Anxiety Disorders and Their Relationship to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Treatment or Placebo,” accepted for publication in Child Psychiatry & Human Development.
  • Topolyan had her coauthored paper “First-best health policy in vaccine markets with health and network externalities” accepted for publication in the Journal of Public Economic Theory.

Summer 2023

  • Economics professor Olivier Parent, PhD, had his joint work with DAAP Professor Rainer vom Hofe, PhD, accepted for publication. Their paper “Estimating the Socioeconomic Impacts of Flooding on Regional Economies with a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model” was published in Water Resources Research.
  • Saran had his coauthored paper “Interim Rationalizable Implementation of Functions” accepted for publication in Mathematics of Operations Research.
  • David Brasington, PhD, economics professor and James C. and Caroline Kautz Chair in Political Economy, had his paper, “The Effect of Open Space Maintenance Spending on House Prices,” accepted for publication in Journal of Regional Science.

Spring 2023

  • Mills, College of Medicine Professor Jeffrey R. Strawn, PhD, Economics PhD student Vikram Suresh, and other coauthors, had their paper, "What is the Added Benefit of Combining Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) in Youth with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? A Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling Meta-Analysis," published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.
  • Associate professor Nicolas Williams, PhD, had his paper titled “Sector Specificity of Training” published in Applied Economics.
  • Saran had his paper “Continuous Level-k Mechanism Design” published in Games and Economic Behavior.
  • Mills, Strawn and other coauthors had their paper "The Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Characterization of 'Long COVID' in Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders: A Prospective Longitudinal Study" published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
  • Parent and former economics doctoral student Huibin Weng had their joint paper, "Beyond homophilic dyadic interactions: the impact of network formation on individual outcomes," published in Statistics and Computing.
  • Mills, Strawn, economics PhD student Vikram Suresh, and coauthors published "The impact of age on antidepressant response: A mega-analysis of individuals with major depressive disorder" in Journal of Psychiatric Research.
  • Mills, Strawn and coauthors published, "Adverse Effects of Antidepressant Medications and their Management in Children and Adolescents," published in Pharmacotherapy.
  • David Brasington, PhD, economics professor and James C. and Caroline Kautz Chair in Political Economy, and Seunghoon Oh, a doctoral student in DAAP’s Regional Development Planning program had their paper, “Transit Finance, Growth, and Equity: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis on the Effect of Transit Revenues on Low-Skilled Employment,” published in Annals of Regional Science. This paper won the 2021 Tiebout Prize at the Western Regional Science Association Conference.
  • Michael Jones, PhD, associate professor educator of economics, wrote the book “More Judgment Than Data: Data Literacy and Decision-Making.” The book delves into what can happen when too much attention is spent on acquiring more data instead of understanding how to best use existing data.
  • Iryna Topolyan, PhD, associate professor and economics department head, and Debashis Pal, PhD, David Sinton Professor of Economics, wrote a paper with another author entitled “Pareto Gains from Limiting Compensation Options.” The paper published in the IZA Journal of Labor Economics.
  • Assistant professor Na Young Lee, PhD, had her paper "Measurement Error and Its Impact on Estimates of Income Dynamics," published in Empirical Economics.
  • Jones had his paper, "How Natural Language Processing Can Identify Essential Nonprofit Organizations," published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership. It was coauthored with researchers at UC's Digital Scholarship Center (DSC). DSC also provided funding through the Mellon Foundation for several economics students to be research assistants on the project.

Real-world Business Insights

See our faculty’s research in action as it drives decisions and practices for real-world business problems:

More than just a walk in the park 

brasington-david

David Brasington, PhD, Professor of Economics, James C. and Caroline Kautz Chair in Political Economy.

The parks that dot your city’s landscape may be beacons of summer fun and home to childhood memories, but they also double as heavy hitters when it comes to local home values and prices. 

A study of local townships, cities and villages in Ohio found that communities that voted to cut taxes and parks and recreation spending saw decreases in home values and an 11% fall in home prices after three years. Although these changes were not seen in the initial two years after the spending cuts, home prices continued to fall in subsequent years after that third year, consistent with worsening park maintenance over time.

Takeaways

  • Communities that vote to cut park funding save $1,400 in lifetime taxes at a cost of $30,140 in house value. 
  • Voting to cut park taxes reduces park spending by 16% and ends up reducing house prices by 13%.

Publication

“Local economic growth and local government investment in parks and recreation, or five cheese pizzas for $2.6 million,” Journal for Regional Science. 
 
Lindner Faculty

David Brasington, PhD, Professor of Economics, James C. and Caroline Kautz Chair in Political Economy