Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UCSD’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society.

THE ECONOMY

Julian Betts,
Labor Economist
Betts is an expert on the economics of education, including the relationship between school spending and school quality and the impact of labor market conditions on educational institutions. Current research includes recent papers on which types of public school spending are most effective; on whether or not there is a link between school spending and students' sub-sequent earnings; on the impact of grade inflation on students' incentive to learn and how labor market conditions, especially unemployment, affect community college enrollments. Betts has also completed a study to determine what undergraduates know about wages. More…

James Hamilton,
Professor of Economics
James Hamilton is an economist who specializes primarily in the fields of monetary policy, business cycles, oil shocks, forecasting and econometrics. He is currently researching normalization in econometrics and the fluctuation of gasoline and oil prices. Hamilton has written extensively on issues in macroeconomics and econometrics, such as business cycles and the effects of oil shocks. He is the author of Time Series Analysis, the best-selling research text on forecasting methods in economics. More…

Gordon Hanson,
Professor of Economics
Hanson is an authority on foreign investment, immigration, and international trade. His major research areas are the impact of NAFTA on the U.S. and Mexican economies, multinational enterprises and the globalization of production, and Mexican immigration in the United States. He has published numerous articles in leading journals in the field of economics on such topics as the impact of globalization on wages, the determinants of illegal immigration, and how trade reform affects regional economies. His most recent book is Immigration Policy and the Welfare State by Oxford University Press. More…

Gina Neff,
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
Neff has expertise in the Internet industry, the new economy, dot-coms, and new information technologies, as well as work in culture industries, internships and unpaid work, social networks and professional networking. Neff has published on the relationship of technology and organizational structure, economic and financial risk within jobs, and entrepreneurial pressures employees face. Her dissertation, entitled “Organizing Uncertainty in Silicon Alley, 1995-2001,” examines the nature of work and risk in the dotcom media firms of the late 1990s in New York’s “Silicon Alley” and uses the empirical example to raise broader theoretical questions about the new economy. More…

Valerie Ramey,
Professor of Economics
Valerie Ramey conducts research in the area of macroeconomics. She has analyzed international data to study the link between business cycle volatility and long-run growth, and has also studied the automobile industry and the measurement of fixed capital in the United States, and the source of increasing wage inequality. Ramey has published research in the area of business cycle fluctuates, analyzing questions such as the roles of inventory investment, money and credit, and technological change in economic fluctuations in the U.S. More…

Ross Starr,
Professor of Economics
An authority on monetary theory, financial markets, the U.S. banking system, and general economic trends and conditions, Ross Starr researches Stock and Bond markets, the Federal Reserve System, interest rates and monetary policy, and the US economy. Starr has published widely on the foundations of monetary theory, general equilibrium theory, non-convex economies, and asset market liquidity. More…

Allan Timmerman,
Professor of Finance
Dr. Timmermann has been a member of UC San Diego's department of economics since 1994 and obtained his Ph.D. from University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments with the Rady School and the economics department. Dr. Timmermann has worked extensively with the Rady School. He served on the faculty recruiting committee and led the visioning, planning and execution of the Rady Economic Forecasting Conference. Prior to this, he was a member of the steering committee and dean search committee for the UCSD Management School. More…

Rossen Valkanov,
Associate Professor of Finance
Rossen Valkanov is an associate professor of finance in the Rady School. Dr. Valkanov received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University. In 1999, he became an assistant professor of finance at UCLA's Anderson School of Management where he remained until his appointment at UC San Diego. From 2001-2004 he served as an assistant professor of finance at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Management, teaching summer courses for the master's program in financial engineering. He is a member of many professional organizations including the American Finance Association, the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society and the Bachelier Society. Dr. Valkanov's main research interests are in the areas of financial econometrics, empirical asset pricing, portfolio choice and monetary economics. He teaches finance courses for the FlexMBA and the Full-Time MBA programs at the Rady School. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UCSD Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/