UMass Boston Economics Department

05/23/2024

Congratulations Class of 2024 🎉👩‍🎓🧑‍🎓Best wishes on your next chapter! 🎊

04/24/2024

TODAY 11:15am to 12:30pm ECON Seminar Series with Katherine Moos (UMass Amherst). The seminar is being held on Zoom: https://umassboston.zoom.us/j/91878936802.

Join us on ZOOM for the next guest speaker in our Economics Seminar Series, Katherine Moos, next Wednesday, April 24th 11:15am-12:30pm

04/18/2024

Join us on ZOOM for the next guest speaker in our Economics Seminar Series, Katherine Moos, next Wednesday, April 24th 11:15am-12:30pm

04/04/2024

Join us for the next Economics Department Seminar on Wednesday, April 10 from 11:15am to 12:30pm held virtually on Zoom (https://umassboston.zoom.us/j/99859580377). Lauren Russell (Federal Reserve Board of Governors) will be presenting “Employer Access to Criminal Record Information and Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes”

02/27/2024

FYI - This Thursday 2/29 @7:00pm
The speaker, Gerald Epstein, is from UMass Amherst, and the topic should be of interest to some UMB students and faculty.

01/12/2024

Fellowship Opportunity:
City of Boston Housing Innovation Lab (iLab)
Apply to Join the iLab’s 2024 Summer Fellowship Cohort!

The City of Boston Housing Innovation Lab (iLab) is seeking a creative thinker with demonstrated interest in urban planning, architecture, housing finance, real estate, or a related field, to help advance the iLab’s project portfolio.

About The iLab

Founded in 2015, the Mayor’s Housing Innovation Lab tests new approaches to housing policy and design to accelerate housing production and achieve affordability for all Bostonians. Our current projects seek to address questions such as:

● What new housing models and tools could help more Bostonians achieve affordable homeownership?
● What new construction methods or materials could maximize the efficiency of housing construction while delivering a cost-effective, high quality product and creating local job opportunities?
● How might we support ways of living together to create new affordable housing opportunities?
The Role

Interns are responsible for managing their own tasks/project(s) and may support other staff working on iLab projects as time allows. These tasks may include, but are not limited to:

● Conducting literature reviews, identifying/engaging stakeholders, and compiling case study research to answer key research questions
● Assisting with the development of requests for ideas and/or proposals and/or designing competitions informed by stakeholder and community engagement to generate innovative ideas and proposals
● Assisting with developing tools to evaluate new ideas and share findings with stakeholders and the community at large
● Assisting with iLab office management and biweekly Office Hours
City of Boston
Mayor’s Office of Housing

The Desired Candidate

iLab fellows are effective project managers, strong relationship builders, and share a passion about meeting Boston’s housing affordability challenges with creative, original solutions. The iLab is seeking a talented individual with a track record that demonstrates both original thinking and an ability to execute in occasionally challenging environments. We are looking for team members who are both comfortable working alone and in a collaborative, team environment.

Compensation
$24/hour
Term of Employment
10 weeks between late May and early August

To Apply

Please complete the application form accessible at the following link by 500 PM on Friday, February 16, 2024.

Application Form:

Access Google Forms with a personal Google account or Google Workspace account (for business use).

12/05/2023

Come join us tomorrow 12/6 @ the Econ Department Seminar from 11:15am to 12:30pm in room W-05-041. Our guest speaker is Franziska Disslbacher (Vienna University & CUNY). Franziska will be presenting “On Top of the Top – A Generalized Approach to the Estimation of Wealth Distributions”

05/08/2023

Deadline to apply for our Accelerated MA Program is July 1st. For more information, contact our Graduate Program Director, Harry Konstantinidis. He can be reached at [email protected]

04/27/2023

Please join us, Wednesday, May 3rd at 3:30 for The David G. Terkla Seminar

04/26/2023

Rob Axtell, will present "Dynamics of American Firms: Data, Theories, and Models”

TODAY 2:30 – 3:45PM on Zoom.

https://umassboston.zoom.us/j/93199749055



Robert Axtell is Professor of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Northwestern University’s Institute for Complex Systems, and was for many years Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His previous MIT Press book, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, co-authored with Joshua Epstein (NYU) is a citation classic. He holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University..



Professor Axtell will be presenting:



Dynamics of American Firms: Data, Theories, and Models

Using micro-data on all U.S. businesses from the past 40+ years, I will first present a series of patterns and gross regularities present in firm sizes, productivities, ages, lifetimes, growth rates, employment, financial measures, networks, and locations, some of which are reasonably well-known, most of which are new. Conventional economic theories of the firm do not explain these patterns. I will then describe a model, written in terms of individual worker agents who autonomously join together to form firm-like groups, that is capable of reproducing many of the patterns in the data.



Here is the zoom link for the seminar: https://umassboston.zoom.us/j/93199749055

Attached is a flyer advertising the talk.

Please join us next Wednesday, April 26th at 2:30

04/19/2023

Please join us next Wednesday, April 26th at 2:30

04/10/2023