Why Economics

Economics Newsletter 2005-2006

McIntyre & Ramstad lead Honors Colloquia	Emily takes on the lottery	McKinstry continues her rise
Meghan revives the Econ Club and then prepares for Atlanta	What way are we headed? Just ask Lardaro & Ramsay	And then there were three Mead, McIntyre, & Ramsay
A traveling brother and sister act	Starkey visits China	Hinchliffe raises funds with art auction
McIntyre learns French	Dirlam Award established	Mead takes on China

Jim Starkey, in 2003, was invited to speak on “Public Finance in Political Perspective” at the Zeijiang University Institute of Economics and Finance in Hangzhou, China. While in Hangzhou, Professor Starkey was able to meet with officials responsible for enforcing China’s environmental laws to discuss the problems of environmental regulation in China. Professor Starkey has been invited to return to China and plans to do so for an extended stay on a future sabbatical leave.

Mark Hinchliffe is set to move on from URI after a successful career here. Before he left, though, Mark, and Michaela McCaughey, organized a silent auction of works by well-known Rhode Island artists - “Rhody Artists for Rhody Evacuees." It was a great event, and before it was over the auction had raised over $6,00 to support the University’s fund to build a Habitat for Humanity house for victims of Hurricane Katrina. ogram Director and philosophy Professor Galen Johnson.

Here we see Mark at the auction with President Robert L. Carothers, Lisa Lahr, and Michaela McCaughey.

Ric McIntyre is now back after a wonderful sabbatical in France. Ric was invited to be a guest researcher at Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l’Economie, a “mixed” research institute funded by the French government and located at the Ecole Normale Superiore – Cachan, in a suburb just south of the city. While there Ric delivered a lecture in Lyon and spent a couple of days in Geneva where he conducted interviews at the International Labor Organization. While in France Ric had a chance to see first-hand those street demonstrations we see on the news occassionally, and he especially enjoyed the tradition of everyone going to lunch together. Every day at 1:00 one of my colleagues would show up in my office and ask “Tu va manger?” “You are going to eat?” And when not at lunch, Ric enjoyed his time in a little hole in the wall wine bar on the tiny Rue des Canettes between Place St. Sulpice and Place St. Germain de Pres. He knew it well enough to have a favorite spot for day time and night time hours, and here you can see him here doing some of his research at Dick Mack's.

Upon his return Ric took on the job of Associate Director of the Honors program.

Art Mead has been working to move to BIG classes in the past few years, and in the Fall of 2004 he finally brought on his first classes with 300+ students. Currently he teaches large versions of both ECN201 and ECN202 and in 2005 Art received the URI Foundation's Teaching Excellence award which he used to establish an annual scholarship for an economics major beginning in 2006-2007. In addition to the large introductory classes, Art continues to teach his "How to lie with numbers" class and each year he teaches a course in the Honors Program. At the present time he is developing a new course entitled, Made in China, and his daughter tells him he MUST do some field work in China - and she is ready to accompany hi there. This will complement his previous road trips. He did some research for his classes with a cross country trip in the summer of 2004 and a trip to that Celtic Tiger in the summer of 2005. He is sad to report, however, that his MWF basketball game disappeared last year, a victim of an aging faculty at the University.