artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Guidon Fenig Joins U. of S. Department of Economics

Inside This issue

2. Undergraduate Programs

4. Graduate Programs

5. Faculty News

7. Alumni Notes

Department of Economics Newsletter

Volume 12 Issue 1

October 2016

The Department of Economics is pleased to announce the appointment of Guidon Fenig as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2016. His research uses experimental economics to analyze coordination in economics environments. He’s studying the dynamics of macroeconomic interactions in lab experiments. Guidon studied economics at Instituto Tecncólogico Autónomo de

Mexico (BA 2007) and at University of British Columbia (PhD 2016). This year he is teaching courses in microeconomics and behavioral economics.

Welcome, Guidon.

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Undergraduate Programs

Page 2 Department of Economics Newsletter

Congratulations to our Newest BA’s:

A.A.H. Alghamdi, M.S. Alqahtani, K.O. Amusa, E. Asuquo, B.N. Baillargeon, J.M. Barker, M.W.

Barker, D. Bofoya, L.B. Carter, T.K. Cebryk, C. Chen, Z. Chen, J. Cheng, L.R. Crooks, J. Crosby,

S. Devendra, G.O. Erimona, B. Fatima, L. A. Gyoerick, B. Han, N.W. Hotsko, W. Hu, M.H.

Jumbo, T.H.C. Krislock, F. J. Lawuyi, P.M. Lefsrud, L. Li, J. Liu, Y. Liu, Y. Lu, S. Ma, T.A. Malik, L.

S. Martens, S. J. McDonald, U.E. Mgbahurike, Y.D. Mu, E. Musashi, E.R. Neufeld, O. Odigie, J.S.

Okereukwu, A.M. Omar, R. Qian, B. Qu, J. Qu, D.A. Rachubinski, L.J. Robertson, K.L. Seibel,

Z. Shi, Y.S. Sokaribo, D.M. Statham, C.L. Su, Y. Sun, T. Tran, Chao Wang, Chenxu Wang, T. P.

Wapass, K.L. Wick, L. A. Wileniec, Y. Wu, J. Xie, Z. Yang, Y. Yehia, Z. Zhan.

Bachelor of Arts Degrees 2016

Undergraduate Awards 2016

Congratulations to our Award Recipients:

Lewis C. Gray Prize in Economics—Krista Seibel

Mabel F. Timlin Prize in Business Economics—Emmanuel Boctor

Peter Dooley Memorial Award—Mars Zhao

Popoff Scholarship—Edrich Crouse

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Undergraduate Programs

Page 3 Department of Economics Newsletter

Submitted by Maxym Chaban

The Bank of Canada has launched an inaugural competition between teams of undergraduate students from Canadian Universities. Each team has to advise the Bank what is the appropriate course of action for monetary policy in Canada and to support the recommendation with research on the state of the economy and potential risks.

The University of Saskatchewan is represented by a team of our undergraduate students (from left to right on the picture): Rainer Kocsis, Danusha Rajapaksa, Nick Hotsko, Blair Baillargeon

The team is coached by two faculty members in Economics, Dr. Maxym Chaban and Dr. Enchuan Shao. Dr. Shao’s several years of experience working with the Bank of Canada are especially helpful.

On November 27, 2015 the first round of competition was among Universities in the Western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia). We are happy to inform that our team made it through the first round and is one of the five teams that competed in the national competition in Ottawa on February 9, 2016. This is a great accomplishment for the team! Congratulations to the team on their success.

The team had to make projections of GDP growth and inflation in Canada. This is because monetary policy is forward looking and when making a decision on interest rates it is important to project growth in Canada for up to two years ahead. The team was also researching on the situation in Canada, the United States, China, and world markets. Looking at Canada there was a concern that business investment declined in the first half of the year, while at the same time corporations tend to increase their cash holdings. Looking at the United States is important because it is the main trading partner of Canada. On the one hand, an unexpected growth in the United States would result in higher exports from Canada. On the other hand, if interest rates start to rise in the United States, it could create risks for the Canadian housing market and household debts.

China is important for Canada because of the demand for our primary commodities. As China slows its growth and undergoes a transformation from a manufacturing export-oriented economy towards a service based economy the demand of commodities is expected to slow. This would be a negative terms-of-trade shock for Canada lowering incomes especially in the commodity-exporting regions. Some of this adjustment has already taken place with the price of oil dropping significantly and prices for other commodities beginning to decline as well.

The team paid special attention to the housing market in Canada. Looking at housing prices there is a substantial increase in the price of housing especially in some markets. Given that the terms-of-trade decline for Canada in the light of low commodity prices and that there is an increase in the supply of housing, a risk is that the housing prices will undergo a correction. While housing is not big part of GDP it possess a risk to the banking industry if many households will default on their mortgages. There are positive signs of the correction in the housing markets with the number of housing permits declining but the question remains with respect to what would happen to interest rates especially in the United States.

Every member of the team has found the experience working on the recommendation and conducting research worthwhile. The experience nicely complements training in academic courses as it focuses more on dealing with data from Statistics Canada and a lot of reading on the current state of the economy.

Bank of Canada Competition 2016-Governors Challenge Team

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Page 4

Graduate Programs

Felix Fosu. Supervisor: Professor M. Chaban

Research Project: Consumption Smoothing and Precautionary Saving for Norway and

Canada

Biaka Imeah. Supervisor: Professor N. Sari

Research Project: Cost-Utility Analysis of Telehealth Collaborative Care Intervention for

People with Chronic Low Back Pain Disorder in Rural Saskatchewan

Mingshi Kang. Supervisor: Professor M. Chaban

Research Project: Size and Asymptotic Power Performance of HAR Wald Tests Using

Fixed-b Theory

Yuyun Li. Supervisor: Professor J. Bruneau

Research Project: Oil Dependence and Health Outcomes

Project: The role of quality of skills in explaining immigrants’ wage gap in Canada Supervisor: Professor Kelly Foley The main objective of this project is to investigate the impact of differences

in quality of skills in explaining wage differentials among immigrants and between immi-grants and Canadians. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is applied to the Eth-nic Diversity Survey (2002), confidential microdata from Statistics Canada, accessed through the Saskatchewan Research Data Centre. The results reveal that the Sheepskin Effect - the premium associated with obtaining credentials – is higher for immigrants from traditional source countries such as US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and North-Western Eu-rope compared to immigrants from other regions. The endowment advantage, in terms of schooling and credentials, which immigrants in general have, is offset by unobserved productivity.

Congratulations Tofik!

Master of Arts—2016

Timlin Award for Best MA Project/Thesis in Economics 2016

Tofik Fite

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Page 5

Chartrand, Harry, Funding the Fine Arts: International Political Economic Trends 1985, 2001 & 2016, May 2016 (publication in Spanish: Córima, Revista de Investigación en Gestión Cultural - Universidad de Guadalajara. http://www.compilerpress.ca/Cultural%20Economics/Works/Funding%20the%20Fine%20Arts%202016.pdf

Anna Klimina (2016) The Role of Culture, Historicity, and Human Agency in the Evolution

of the State: A Case Against Cultural Fatalism, Journal of Economic Issues, 50:2, 557-565

Papers at Conferences: (2016)“Role of culture, historicity and human agency in guiding the evolution of the state”

Paper at the Annual Meeting of Association for Evolutionary Economics/ Allied Social Science Association, San Francisco, January 4.

(2016) “Women in economics in twentieth-century Russia” Paper at the 43th Annual Meeting of the History of Economics Society at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, June 18, 2016 Sari, N. , “Time Inconsistent Preferences in Intertemporal Choices for Physical Activity &

Weight Loss: Evidence from Canadian Health Surveys”. In M. Altman (Eds) Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Smart Decision-Making: Rational Decision-Making within the Bounds of Reason, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing (31 pages) (in press).

Sari, N. and M. Osman. 2015. “The Effects of Patient Education Programs on Medication Use Among Asthma and COPD Patients: a Propensity Score Matching with a Difference-in-Difference Regression Approach”. BMC Health Services Research 15(1): Article 332.

Shao, E. and Fund, B.S.C. 2016. “Counterfeit Quality and Verification in a Monetary

Exchange”. Economic Modelling (52):13-25. Zhao, Jingang, “TU Oligopoly Games and Industrial Cooperation”. In L. Corchon and M.

Marini (ed.), Handbook of Game Theory and Industrial Organization. Cheltenham, Uk: Edward Elgar (forthcoming in 2017).

Faculty News

Some Recent Research

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Page 6

Faculty News

Olley Award for Teaching Excellence in Economics

Joel Bruneau was awarded the 2016 Olley Award for Teaching Excellence in Economics by the Economics Students Society. Congratulations, Joel!

2016-2017 Sabbaticals

Term 1 & Term 2—Jinga Zhao Term 2— Maxym Chaban

Visiting Professors

Lianfen Wang, Hunan University, China, July2015-June 2016

Research Topic: Environmental Economics

Zheng Yuan, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China, February 2016-February 2017.

Research Topic: Law and Economics

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Page 7

October 28, Dmytro Hryshko, University of Alberta November 25, Russell Wong, Federal Reserve of Richmond November 30, Donna Feir, University of Victoria March 8, 2017 —Timlin Lecture in Economics

Faculty News

Recent Seminars and Lectures

February 22, Martin Boileau , University of Colorado, “The Price of Imported Capital and Consumption Fluctuations in Emerging Economies” March 4, Ron Cheung, Oberlin College, “Household Debt and Local Public Finances” March 15, David Andolfatto, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Monetary Policy & Financial Stability” March 15, David Andolfatto, Timlin Lecture in Economics, “Secular Stagnation” April 1, Pedro Silos, Temple University, “Expenditure vs. Time Across Households and Across Decades” April 7, Silvia Goncalves, Western University ,“Bootstrapping Factor Models with Cross Sectional Dependence” May 19, Shuatao Cao, Bank of Canada, “Growth Accounting in a Small Open Economy: Sector-Specific Technological Change and Relative Prices of Trade” May 20, Guidon Fenig, University of British Columbia, “Asset Trading and Monetary Policy in Production Economies” September 28, Luba Petersen, Simon Fraser University, “Coordinating Expectations through Central Bank Projections” October 14, Sonja Chen, University of Calgary, “Adverse Selection in the Labour Market and the Demand for Vocational Education”

Upcoming Seminars and Lectures

artsandscience.usask.ca/economics

Luke A. Atazona, MA, 2012 I currently work as the Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of Operations at the Youth Employment Agency in Ghana. Before, I had worked as the Research Economist at the Office of President in Ghana and Senior Advisor on Tax and Revenue Administration at German Development Corporation (GIZ) in Accra Ghana.

Tofik Fite, MA 2015 I have been employed by TD bank as a financial advisor since January 2016.

Tanveer Islam, MA, 2013 I have been working with the Ministry of Economy of the Government of Saskatchewan as a Senior Economic Policy Analyst for almost 2 years now.

Nafis Razzak, MA, 2012 I graduated in 2012 with my Masters degree and I started working at (Policy Analyst, Department of Energy) Government of Alberta on July 2014. Previously I worked as an Account Manager FSR II at CIBC from Sept 2012 to June 2014.

For a more complete list of publications, please see our

department website: http://artsandscience.usask.ca/economics/research/

facultyresearch.php

9 Campus Drive

Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5

Fax: 306-966-1641

Email: mj.hanson@usask.ca

Visit our Website:

<artsandscience.usask.ca/

/economics/>

Department of Economics

College of Arts & Science

To Update Your Contact

Information:

Please send any updates to the Economics Department email:

economics.dept@usask.ca

phone: 306-966-5197. Thank you.

Members of the Department

Alumni Notes