The pool of contributors consists of the Graduate Center and CUNY faculty and students, researchers from other institutions, as well as industry experts.

 

Contributors


Paul Krugman

Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a renowned columnist at New York Times, Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008 for developing the New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. Prior to this award, he was the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, given every other year to the top economist under the age of 40 and was given the Asturias Award by the King of Spain, the equivalent of the European Pulitzer Prize. Krugman’s major contributions to the academic research are in international trade, liquidity traps, and currency crises. He published more than 200 journal articles and he is the author or editor of more than 20 books. Krugman served as the senior international economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan, he has been a consultant to several international institutions and countries, and he is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the NBER and a member of the Group of Thirty. Krugman received his Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Merih Uctum

Merih Uctum is professor of International Macroeconomics and Finance at the Graduate Center/Brooklyn college, City University of New York. Uctum’s research includes work on international porfolio flows and foreign direct investment; international finance integration; financial crisis; corporate profits; exchange rates and sustainability of foreign debt and intertemporal solvency; she serves as a member of the Board of Economic Advisors to the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee. Previously Uctum was Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before joining CUNY, she was research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She received a Ph.D. in economics from Queen’s Univeristy, Canada.

Jim Orr

Jim Orr recently retired from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he most recently served as Vice President and Head of the Regional Analysis Function. During his tenure at the New York Fed, Jim co-authored articles on the construction of indexes of economic activity for New York State, New York City and New Jersey, the price of land in the New York metropolitan area, the impact of the 9/11 attack on New York City, and the economic and fiscal situation in Puerto Rico. His experience includes an assignment to the New York City Office of the Deputy Mayor where he authored a report on foreign investment in the city. Prior to working at the New York Fed, Jim was an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and an Assistant Professor at Manhattan College. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Business Administration from Drexel University.

 

Timothy Goodspeed

Timothy Goodspeed is a Professor of Economics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. He is also a network fellow at CESifo (Munich) and affiliated with GEN (Spain). Previously he worked as an economist in the Office of Tax Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Florida International University. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada (FEDEA) in Madrid, the OECD (Paris), and a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, University of Rennes I (France), and CESifo (Munich). He has consulted for the OECD and the ADB. His research spans several aspects of public economics including taxation, intergovernmental fiscal relations, tax competition, and issues in international taxation of multinational corporations and transfer pricing. He is currently working on research projects relating to taxation of the financial sector, public insurance for natural disasters, intergovernmental fiscal policies, and global tax competition. Dr. Goodspeed received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland.

 

Fotios Siokis

Fotios Siokis is a professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. Previously, he worked for a number of years as a senior economist in Alpha Bank, Athens, Greece and in AT&T, Business Communication Services in New Jersey. He has been a consultant to several international companies in the area of technology investments. His research interests are in the areas of the industrial organization of the Banking System, the relationship between the political cycles and the macroeconomy and of the macro stability and growth in the Balkan area. Fotios holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

 

Guest Contributors


Francesc Ortega

Francesc Ortega is the Dina Axelrad Perry Associate Professor in Economics at the Queens College of the City University of New York. His previous appointments were Assistant and Associate Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). His research is on migration, combining methods and theories from labor and international economics. He has researched the political economy of immigration policy investigating the effects of enfranchisement on domestic politics. He has also studied the effects of immigration on labor and housing markets. More recently, he has conducted research aimed at quantifying the economic contribution of undocumented workers to the U.S. economy, and how legalization of this population could enhance that contribution further. He also works on analyzing how rising sea levels impact the economic activity of coastal cities. Francesc received his Ph.D. in Economics from New York University in 2004.

Sangeeta Pratap

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Economics, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. CV

Sangeeta Pratap joined the economics department at Hunter College in the Spring of 2006. She was an Assistant Professor and Fellow at Centro de Investigación Económica Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico prior to joining the department. Her research and teaching interests include Macroeconomics, Development Economics, and Econometrics. Dr. Pratap received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1998.

Branko Milanovic

Affiliation: Visiting Presidential Professor, the Graduate Center; Core faculty, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality; Senior Scholar, Luxembourg Income Studies. CV

Branko Milanovic served as the lead economist in World Bank Research Department for almost 20 years and as a senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington from 2003 to 2005. He has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Milanovic’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, as well as historically. He has published a number of articles on the methodology and empirics of global income distribution and the effects of globalization (Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Philosophy, among others). His book, The Haves and the Have-nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (2011) was translated into seven languages and selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. His new book, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016), addresses economic and political issues of globalization, including the redefinition of the “Kuznets cycles.”

Anthony Rodolakis

Anthony serves as the Director of Tax and Economic Studies for the New York State Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee. He is an economist with over 23 years of experience in the private and government sectors as well as a frequent lecturer at the University at Albany. During seven years in the private sector Anthony served as Research Manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Hospitality and Leisure Practice, providing consulting services to investment banks, tourism offices, CVBs, and hotel corporations. In his current role Anthony supervises legislative analysts and economists focused on tax-related legislative initiatives, revenue forecasting, budget analysis, as well as analyzing and forecasting the U.S. and NYS economies.

 

Howard Chernick

Affiliation: Professor of Economics, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. CV

Howard Chernick is Professor of Economics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. He is a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, and a board member of Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy and the Structured Employment Economic Development Corporation. He has served as a technical advisor to the OECD, and the Fiscal and Financial Commission of South Africa. He has been an invited visiting professor in Rennes, France, and in 2015 was awarded a Fulbright specialist grant for study in Paris. He has published widely in the areas of fiscal federalism, urban public finance, and anti-poverty policy.

 

Miguel Acosta-Henao

Miguel Acosta-Henao is a graduate student in economics and ARC Fellow at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research fields are macroeconomics, growth, and development. Miguel holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a Master’s degree in Economics. Additionally, he has several years of experience in emerging market macroeconomic research and has consulted for several firms in Latin America on macroeconomic analysis. He is currently a consultant for the Research Department at the Interamerican Development Bank and also works as a Teaching Adjunct at Queens College and as a research assistant for Professor Sangeeta Pratap at Hunter College.

 

Richmond Kyei-Fordjour

Richmond Kyei-Fordjour is an economics Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and also Sr. Principal Quantitative Analyst at Intercontinental Exchange. His fields of research are financial economics, and International Macroeconomics. Richmond holds a B.S. and M.S. in Engineering, an M.B.A. concentrating in Finance, and a M.A. in Statistics and Applied Maths. He has previously worked as a consultant at Fannie Mae, and also in Mortgage Analytics/Research at the erstwhile Lehman Brothers and at Barclays Capital.

 

Richard Nugent
ARC/ESG Fellow

Richard Nugent is a Ph.D. student in the economics program and an Advanced Research Collaborative/ESG Fellow at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Richard holds a B.A. degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also completed the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program. During his internship with the United States International Trade Commission, he worked on projects relevant to the NAFTA renegotiation and research on the role of foreign direct investment in the trade relationships between the United States and Mexico, and between the United States and China. Richard is interested in the role policy plays in shaping multinational enterprise behavior . He teaches at Hunter College where The Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center has supported his effort to emphasize the importance of effective writing about STEM topics in his curriculum.

 

Joseph van der Naald
ARC/ESG Fellow

Joseph van der Naald is a graduate student in the program in sociology and an ARC Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on the political economy of the American welfare state. Joseph is also a teaching assistant at Queens College, CUNY, and a research analyst for the Joseph S. Murphy Institute at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. He holds an undergraduate degree in psychology from Portland State University and a master’s degree in sociology and social anthropology from Central European University.

 

Zhuo Xi
Staff

Zhuo Xi is a graduate student in economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His fields of interest include financial economics, international macroeconomics and economic issues in China. Zhuo holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master’s degree both in mathematics from New York University and has conducted several research projects in applied mathematics. Zhuo is mainly responsible for the WeChat platform of the Economic Studies Group. Zhuo Xi also works as an instructor and quantitative fellow at Queens College.

 

Fadime Demiralp
Sallie Mae Fellow

Fadime Demiralp is a graduate student in economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research fields are financial economics, international macroeconomics, and monetary economics. Fadime holds a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Art and Science, and a Master of Philosophy in Mathematics. Currently, Fadime works as an instructor for the Mathematics and Statistics Department of Hunter College and the Economics Department of Brooklyn College, and as a research assistant for the Economic Studies Group.

 

Yoshiko Oka

Yoshiko Oka is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research fields are applied econometrics, labor economics, and entrepreneurship. Yoshiko holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in Economics from Hunter College, and she has previously worked as a research analyst for a consulting firm in the DC area. Currently, she is working on her dissertation on entrepreneurship, and she also works as a research assistant for a private firm.