The Wesleyan Connection

Tom Kannam

Tom Kannam, vice president and chief investment officer, was a guest speaker at the Middlesex Country Chamber of Commerce’s Young Professionals Alliance Economy and Finance Seminar on Feb. 24. Jeff Pugliese, staff liaison to the Young Professionals Alliance, said Kannam “provided great insight at a time when the economy is on every one’s mind.”

Masami Imai, assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of East Asian studies, and Richard Grossman, chair and professor of economics, are co-authors of the article, “Japan’s Return to Gold: Turning Points in the Value of the Yen during the 1920s,” published in Explorations in Economic History, 2009.

Francisco Rodríguez, assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of Latin American studies, is the co-author of “Anarchy, State, and Dystopia: Venezuelan Economic Institutions before the Advent of Oil,” published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research 28(1), January 2009, pp. 102-21.

In addition, Rodríguez is the author of two book reviews in the December 2008 edition of the Journal of Economic Literature: “Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics by Roberto Mangabeira Unger,” and “A Year without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni.”

Gary Yohe, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, is the co-author of “Assessing dangerous climate change through an update of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ‘reasons for concern” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009.

Masami Imai, assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of East Asian Studies, presented his paper “Crowding-Out Effects of a Government-Owned Depository Institution: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Japan,” at the Japan Economic Seminar at Columbia University.

Michael Lovell, the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Sciences, emeritus, is the author of “Social Security’s Five OASI Inflation Indexing Problems,” published in
Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Vol. 3, 2009.

Richard Grossman, chair and professor of economics, was quoted in an article titled “The Turning Point” about the Lehman failure at Thedeal.com (carried by Reuters).

In addition, Grossman gave interviews on banking system “stress tests” and the prospects for government ownership on WOOD (Grand Rapids, Mich.), WJNO (West Palm Beach, Fla.), WHAS (Louisville, Ky.), WFLA (Tampa, Fla.), XM Satellite Radio, KOGO (San Diego, Calif.), WILM (Wilmington, De.), WSYR (Syracuse, N.Y.), KVI (Seattle, Wash.), and WGST (Atlanta, Ga.).

Dick Miller, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, emeritus, is the author of “The Weighted Cost of Capital is not Quite Right” and “The Weighted Cost of Capital is Not Quite Right: Reply to M Pierru,” published in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2009.

Masami Imai, assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of East Asian studies, is the author of “Political Influence and Declarations of Bank Insolvency in Japan,” published in the Journal of Money Credit, and Banking, 2009.

Gary Yohe, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics.

Gary Yohe, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, has been appointed to the Adaptation Subcommittee of the Connecticut Governor’s Steering Committee on Climate Change, 2008-2010.

He also has been selected to be a member of the National Research Council Committee on America’s Climate Choices: Panel on Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change, 2008-2011. The panel will host a Climate Summit in DC at the end of March and provide Congress and the Administration a review of the panel’s “Choices” by the end of the year. A synthetic blueprint will then be created by an umbrella panel.

Yohe also helped organize an Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research and Medicine in Washington, DC. It focused on climate change to inform the research agenda of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. In addition, Yohe moderated a session and gave a talk on “Economic Analysis of a Basic and Applied Research Agenda: Strategies for Prioritization” on Jan. 16.