Employment Opportunity

Hello everyone,

Prof. Filer circulated an e-mail announcing job openings for a firm where two of our graduate alumni hold positions. Here is the firm's self-description:

"o3 Technology Solutions LLC, provides a competitive edge for many of the most demanding and influential financial institutions by delivering pragmatic domain and technology consulting expertise in support of derivative trading, risk management and capital market solutions from the leading application vendors."

It sounds IT-intensive, but they are looking for soon-to-be MA grads. The e-mail is too lengthy to post, but if you did not receive the initial correspondence, let me know, and I'll forward it to you.

Tavneet Suri talk moved to May 1

From Profs. Conning and Nyman:

Dear Everyone,

Change of schedule: We have moved Tavneet Suri's brown bag seminar to
Monday May 1. Therefore there will be NO SEMINAR ON MONDAY April 24th as
previously announced.

The talk details are now as follows:

MONDAY MAY 1 at 11:30AM-1PM
Tavneet Suri (Yale/MIT Sloan)
"Selection and Comparative Advantage in Technology Adoption"

Papers and schedule at: http://urban.hunter.cuny.edu/RePEc/seminar/

Jonathan and Ingmar

Project Help Group Update

***UPDATE***- I will not be in on Wednesday at all, or Thursday until the evening, as I'm a bit under the weather; however, someone will be there to unlock the TA lounge both days, and the snacks, soda, and tea are still there.

The Project Help Groups will be meeting from 10-5 monday, and approximately 10am-8pm the other days (It may thin out as it gets later, but I will stay to try to help those people who work during the day). We have scheduled the conference room starting at 9am all 5 days, but it takes me two hours to get there, so all I can promise is that I will be there to unlock it between 9-10am.

Other notes:
The group is for people who are having technical problems, e.g. "is this a good instrument," "do I need this dummy variable,""I have holes in my data about energy usage in some countries," "I'm having issues with stat-transfer,""I'm not sure if running the regression this way is testing for exactly what I'm trying to test for," etc..

BRING YOUR STUDENT ID- While we have reserved the room, security may be checking student IDs on the way in. Also be aware that the bookstore has shortened hours and the cafeteria is closed. (There will only be snack foods and soda at the conference room).

When you show up for the group, you should have most of your data... this means you should understand your hypothesis thoroughly, and have at least a ballpark estimate of what variables you will need. If there is some data you know you need, but are having difficulty actually finding it, we will be glad to try to help. Nobody expects you to be done with your project, and everyone expects that at some point you will probably discover a need to add some additional variables to cut down or get rid of endogenaity in your u term. Due to everyone elses high workload, please do not come unprepared, very few people, if any, will have the time to actually read your entire proposal, and of those, nobody will have the time to tell you with any degree of precision exactly how you should go about executing your entire proposal (which is something that should be in your proposal anyway). I apologize if this seems brusque, but I've received several requests for help over the last two days that indicate at least a few of you who are planning on going to these sessions need to first see Professor Deb about your final proposal as laid out in homework 3.

MA Internship Opportunity

Please e-mail Prof. Filer with your resume if you're interested:

The Human Development Report Office (HDRO) of the United Nations Development programme (UNDP) is hiring for a short-term, part-time position. As one of its outputs HDRO produces the Human Development Report, UNDP's flagship publication and one of most read reports from the UN system. The statistical tables published in the Report are one of the visible parts and the information in them is carefully verified.The position involves taking part in this verification process, checking the statistical tables and other materials against source material. The position requires meticulous attention to detail, the ability to take initiative and work independently, as well as solid understanding of development statistics. Preferably, the candidate has done some coursework in statistics or economics.The position is part-time (10-20 hours per week, flexible hours) for two to three months beginning mid-April.

A Few More Tips

I've gotten a few questions about how to use it, so here goes:

The new CIA world factbook for 2006 is out and available (in zip file)at
http://www2.cia.gov/factbook2006.zip

You can obtain 2002-2005 versions simply by using www2.cia.gov/factbook(yearyouwant).zip

When you do a search from the index of any of the downloaded factbooks, it automatically takes you (via the internet) to the 2006 data. If what you are looking for is field data (e.g. population by country, or GDP by country), simply look at the four digit field ID, go to wherever your copy is stored locally, go into the fields folder, and open the file with the matching ID number. Remember to read notations in the fields, especially with regard to your 2006 numbers, be sure to use the GDP measured in PPP if you are comparing with previous years measured in PPP unless you've done the legwork and are converting everything into OER. Also, be careful when copy-pasting entire fields, countries come and go, and sometimes change names. I don't know if this applies to anyone here, but also keep an eye out (depending on how far back your data goes) with regard to the population and economy of Hong Kong and Taiwan with relation to their inclusion in statistics for China.

Monday April 10, Economics Seminar on Civil Conflict in Nepal

From Professor Jonathan Conning:

Hi everyone,

This is just a reminder, Monday's talk by Karen Macours should be interesting to anybody interested in development and political economy, and given how Nepal has been in the news lately, it's a timely topic:

Karen Macours from Johns Hopkins/SAIS, Washington DC

http://urban.hunter.cuny.edu/RePEc/seminar/Nepal_civilconflict_apr606.pdf

Abstract:

This paper investigates the relationship between relative deprivation and the escalation of the civil conflict in Nepal. Poverty in Nepal increased substantially between 1995 and 2003, which seems puzzling given the political instability and the rise and strengthening of the insurgency. We hypothesize that increasing differences in welfare among different groups - i.e., relative deprivation as opposed to absolute deprivation - can help explain this puzzle. The hypothesis is tested with data from 2 national-representative household surveys, matched with information regarding mass abductions by the Maoists, obtained from an extensive search of newspaper articles. The identification strategy relies on the fact that the months following finalization of the second round of data collection were characterized by a strengthening of the insurgency and a geographical escalation of the conflict. The paper shows that households with relatively large land holdings have gained disproportionally from recent growth, resulting in relative deprivation of the (near) landless. Recruiting by Maoists through abduction of young people is found to be more important in districts where inequality between the landed and the landless had increased.

As usual the seminar schedule is at: http://urban.hunter.cuny.edu/RePEc/seminar/

Thanks

Hunter now has access to the Social Sciences Citation Index

Here's how to access it:

1. Go to the Hunter library website, and select Databases.
2. Select the 'Web of Science' database.
   
3. Use your Hunter e-mail system ID to log-in.
4. Social Sciences is one of three indexes that you can choose to search
   

Keep in mind that Hunter has only paid for three people to be simultaneously logged-in to the database.