Assessment Details
Academic Year: 2020-2021 Level: Graduate
Campus Department: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences [UG and Grad]
Program Type: Major [UG] / Program [Grad]
Program Name: Economics PhD (Link)
Description of Data Collection:
As economists, we like the “market test” of our students’ accomplishments! We gauge our students’ performance by (1) their receipt of prestigious fellowships, grants, and prizes; (2) their invitations to selective and competitive conferences; (3) their placements when they seek employment; and (4) the publication of their dissertation chapters as papers in good journals. Here is a partial list of our students’ accomplishments in these four areas over the last few years.
Fellowships, Grants & Prizes:
Marco Brianti:Carlo Giannini Prize for best conference paper by young scientist, 2021 IRMC Best Young Researcher Paper Prize, 2020
Cristian Figueroa Berrios, scholarship from American Society of Health Economists, 2021
Ryan Westphal, Russell Sage Foundation Small Grant in Behavioral Economics, 2020
Laura Gati, Dissertation Fellowship from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, summer 2020
Praveen Saini, finalist for best paper prize, Winter School Conference, New Delhi, 2020 (selected in top 25 out of 254 papers)
Pietro Dall’Ara, University of Bonn Summer Research Fellowship, 2020 (deferred)
Luca Gemmi, European Central Bank Summer Research Fellowship, 2020 (deferred)
Alexey Khazanov, Clough Center Graduate Fellowship, 2020
Ilaria D’Angelis, Clough Center Graduate Fellowship, 2020
Rossella Calvi, BC nomination for Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools’ Doctoral Dissertation Award in Social Science, 2020
Vito Cormun, Clough Center Graduate Fellowship, 2019
Laura Gati, Clough Center Graduate Fellowship, 2019
Pierre de Leo: Donald and Hèléne White Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in the Social Sciences, 2019
Krisztina Horvath: Data Scholarship, Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, 2019 Dissertation Grant, 2019, Institute on Aging, Boston College
Gian Caspari Doc.Mobility fellowship, Swiss National Science Foundation, 2018, for project “Matching Refugees to European Countries.” Recipient can spend AY 2018-19 at any university in the world to work on dissertation research (he visited Oxford).
Prestigious Conferences:
Ilaria D’Angelis, WEAI Graduate Student Workshop, 2021 Andrew Copland
7th Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences (meeting with Nobel laureates in economics) Foundations of Utility and Risk Conference, Sydney, 2020 (postponed to 2021)
Zhuzhu Zhou, Foundations of Utility and Risk Conference, Sydney, 2020 (postponed to 2021)
Xirong Lin, Australian Gender Economics Workshop, 2019
Alex Poulsen, North East Universities Development Conference, Cornell University, 2019
Kenzo Imamura, Summer School of the Econometric Society, 2019
Krisztina Horvath
WEAI Graduate Student Workshop, 2019, San Francisco
International Industrial Organization Conference, Rising Star Session, 2019, Boston
Selected placements (economics departments unless stated otherwise, all tenure-track or permanent positions):
Marco Brianti, 2021, Assistant Professor, University of Alberta
Laura Gati, 2021, Research Department, European Central Bank
Liyang Hong, 2021, Assistant Professor, Xiamen University of Technology
Zhuzhu Zhou, 2021, Assistant Professor, Xiamen University, of Technology
Vito Cormun, 2020, Santa Clara University
Zafer Kanik, 2020, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith School of Business
Pierre De Leo, 2019, University of Maryland
Dominique Brabant, 2019, Colgate University
Michael Connolly, 2019, Colgate University
Lauren Hoehn Velasco, 2018, Bryn Mawr College
Penglong Zhang, 2018, Tsinghua University (the “MIT-equivalent” of China)
These placements are due to the research excellence and promise of our students. In addition, a number of students have received offers from top liberal arts colleges, attesting to their excellence in teaching as well. These include offers from Smith College (to Vito Cormun and Giri Subramanian in 2020, both declined), from Bryn Mawr College (to Lauren Hoehn Velasco in 2018, accepted), and from Hamilton College (to Deeksha Kale in 2018, declined).
Selected publications from dissertation research:
(Unfortunately, the publication process in economics is so slow that few students succeed in publishing before they graduate. Most of the following are recent Ph.D. recipients, and all the papers are chapters from their dissertations.)
Bo Wang (current student) with X. Chen and B. Wang, “Copula-Based Time Series with Filtered Nonstationarity,” Journal of Econometrics, (2021, forthcoming).
Lauren Hoehn Velasco (PhD 2018), “The Long-term Impact of Preventative Public Health Programs,” Economic Journal (2021): 797-826.
Jacob Penglase (PhD 2019), “Consumption Inequality Among Children: Evidence from Child Fostering in Malawi,” Economic Journal (2021): 1000-1025.
*Rossella Calvi (PhD 2016), “Why Are Older Women Missing in India? The Age Profile of Bargaining Power and Poverty,” Journal of Political Economy (2020): 2453-2501.
Giacomo Candian (PhD 2016) & Mikhail Dmitriev (PhD 2014), “Risk aversion, uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, and the financial accelerator,” Review of Economic Dynamics (2020): 299-322.
Giacomo Candian (PhD 2016), “Information frictions and real exchange rate dynamics,”
Journal of International Economics (2019): 189-205.
Mikhail Dmitriev & Jonathan Hoddenbagh (both PhD 2014), “Optimal fiscal transfers in a monetary union,” Journal of International Economics (2019): 189-205.
Lauren Hoehn Velasco (PhD 2018), “Explaining Declines in U.S. Rural Mortality, 1910-1933: The Role of County Health Departments” Explorations in Economic History 70 (2018): 42-72.
*Publication in one of the top-five general-interest economics journals. The others are excellent field journals or lower-ranked general-interest journals.
a) All students must pass comprehensive exams in micro and macro theory, administered by our micro and macro theorists. Students have three chances to pass each theory exam. The exams are given at the end of their first year, at the beginning of the second year, and at the end of the second year. Students cannot continue in the program unless they pass both exams by the end of their second year.
b) All students must pass two field comprehensive exams by the end of their fourth year. These exams are administered by faculty who specialize in the individual fields. Students have two chances to pass each field exam.
c) Coursework during the first two years is graded and, in our program, students must maintain a B+ average each year in the first two years to remain in good standing and continue to receive financial aid. The coursework grades and the comprehensive theory exams are designed to demonstrate that our students have achieved the ability to understand the analytical foundations of economic theory. They are then expected to do novel work in theoretical modeling applied to their chosen fields in their research papers consistent with the state of the art in economics, and to exhibit a broad knowledge of their fields of specialization.
a. Students demonstrate their ability to conduct publishable research by means of their doctoral dissertations. Most students begin in their third year, having completed all their coursework in the first two years and having passed the micro and macro theory comprehensive exams (and usually both field exams as well). Each student forms a dissertation committee consisting of three faculty members. Someone outside the Department with expertise in the student’s topic can serve as one of the three members. The dissertation committee members ultimately determine the quality of each dissertation under their direction, in particular whether they believe the dissertation, in part or in whole, is publishable in a good economics journal.
b. A major new innovation in our graduate program, implemented for the first time in AY 2020-21, is the extension of our Dissertation Workshop to (1) include fifth-year students, and (2) give 90-minute time slots to students about to go on the job market. Job market students presenting seminars on visits to universities and other prospective employers usually have 90 minutes, so this talk serves as a “dress rehearsal.” In order to meet the higher demand, we have expanded the Dissertation Workshop to have two weekly sections, each with two faculty members as advisers. We still have some teething problems with the new format, but it’s clearly a significant improvement over what we had before.
Third-, fourth- and now fifth-year dissertation-writing students are required to attend and participate in one of two sections of the weekly Dissertation Workshop. They must present their work both semesters of the third year, fourth, and fifth years. Each section of the Dissertation Workshop is organized by two faculty members, who read and comment on the students’ work. Students also comment on their fellow students’ work.
c. To remain in good standing and continue to receive financial aid, all students must submit a dissertation abstract signed by two faculty members by April 1 of their third year, and a more detailed dissertation proposal signed by two faculty members by October 1 of their fourth year.
d. The purpose of the Dissertation Workshop and the timeline for dissertation abstract and proposal submission is to help ensure that our students are making steady and timely progress on dissertations that will lead to publications in respected economics journals.
e. Evidence of skill in classroom teaching comes from the faculty who supervise the Teaching Assistants, classroom visits by faculty of the first-time Teaching Fellows, and student evaluations of the Teaching Assistants and Teaching Fellows.
f. Almost all students serve as Teaching Assistants (TAs) in one or more of the following undergraduate courses: Principles of Economics, Statistics, Econometric Methods, and Statistics and Econometric Methods labs, working under the supervision of the faculty who
teach these courses. Some of the more talented TAs also serve as Teaching Fellows (TFs) in their fourth and fifth years, teaching their own sections of Principles, Statistics and Micro or Macro Theory. The TAs in Principles and the graded Statistics and Econometric Methods labs teach in formal classroom settings.
g. All TFs meet with one or more faculty members before their first semester of teaching to learn about how to prepare syllabi, manage their classes, handle difficult students and class absences, and the like, and about Boston College’s general expectations regarding undergraduate classes. A faculty member also visits one class taught by a first-time TF roughly halfway through the semester and meets with the student afterward to convey his/her impressions of the class and how it might be improved.
Review Process:
a. Evidence on student progress in coursework and the dissertation is collected from the faculty by Casey Eaton, the administrative assistant to our Ph.D. program, and monitored throughout the year by the Director of Graduate Studies, currently Susanto Basu. The graduate faculty meets once each year in late May to review the outcomes from the most recent academic year. We spend most of our time on borderline cases, debating whether a student should remain on financial aid and what advice the Director of Graduate Studies should convey to the student. The evaluation of students includes their coursework, performance on comprehensive exams, dissertation progress, and satisfactory performance as TAs, TFs, and Graduate Assistants (GAs).
b. We also examine overall programmatic success in achieving our goals and vote on recommended changes as needed. The Chair reviews any recommended changes for their feasibility. Given the Chair’s approval, the graduate faculty implements the changes. An example relating to our students’ writing skills is given in 5) below.
Resulting Program Changes:
We are increasingly concerned at the length of time that students are taking before they start producing dissertation research. To help them make the transition from consuming knowledge to producing it, we have taken the following steps:
1) As discussed in point (3) above, we have expanded the scope of our Dissertation Workshop. The Workshop is the department’s institutional method for ensuring that students make steady progress in their research, over and above the supervision of individual faculty advisers. To get students to start thinking about research from the beginning of the third year, after their first two years of coursework, we have created space in the newly-expanded Workshop for students to present research ideas in the Fall semester of their third years. Previously they would present only in the Spring, meaning that some students might focus on research only towards the end of the third year.
2) We have changed the majority of our second-year courses from exam-based to paper writing-based courses. Since we made this change only recently, it is too early to assess the outcome. The idea is to give students practice in writing research papers, both to improve their writing and, ideally, to give them some momentum on a dissertation as they move into their third year, the first year of their dissertation work.
3) We now try to secure enough summer funding for all first- and second-year students to work as Summer Research Assistants to faculty working in their desired fields of specialization. We view this as an apprenticeship phase, before the students start producing their own research under the supervision of their advisers, at which time traditional guilds would classify them as journey-men and -women.
4) We have created institutions to focus graduate students on discussing and presenting research in its early stages. In the field of Macroeconomics, we have formed both a Macro Lunch seminar and a Macro Reading Group. The Lunch is a weekly, in-house seminar at which both students and faculty present work-in-progress. It is attended by the vast majority of faculty and graduate students doing research in the field, who provide feedback. The Reading Group, started and shaped by assistant professor Tzuo Law, is now a student-run weekly meeting in which graduate students choose interesting and influential recent research papers. At each meeting, one student presents the paper of the week, while the others ask questions, with the common goal of understanding the research and its implications at a deep level. The Industrial Organization group is forming similar institutions. These field-specific groups complement the department-wide Dissertation Workshop discussed earlier.
Date of Most Recent Program Review:
We are increasingly concerned at the length of time that students are taking before they start producing dissertation research. To help them make the transition from consuming knowledge to producing it, we have taken the following steps:
1) As discussed in point (3) above, we have expanded the scope of our Dissertation Workshop. The Workshop is the department’s institutional method for ensuring that students make steady progress in their research, over and above the supervision of individual faculty advisers. To get students to start thinking about research from the beginning of the third year, after their first two years of coursework, we have created space in the newly-expanded Workshop for students to present research ideas in the Fall semester of their third years. Previously they would present only in the Spring, meaning that some students might focus on research only towards the end of the third year.
2) We have changed the majority of our second-year courses from exam-based to paper writing-based courses. Since we made this change only recently, it is too early to assess the outcome. The idea is to give students practice in writing research papers, both to improve their writing and, ideally, to give them some momentum on a dissertation as they move into their third year, the first year of their dissertation work.
3) We now try to secure enough summer funding for all first- and second-year students to work as Summer Research Assistants to faculty working in their desired fields of specialization. We view this as an apprenticeship phase, before the students start producing their own research under the supervision of their advisers, at which time traditional guilds would classify them as journey-men and -women.
4) We have created institutions to focus graduate students on discussing and presenting research in its early stages. In the field of Macroeconomics, we have formed both a Macro Lunch seminar and a Macro Reading Group. The Lunch is a weekly, in-house seminar at which both students and faculty present work-in-progress. It is attended by the vast majority of faculty and graduate students doing research in the field, who provide feedback. The Reading Group, started and shaped by assistant professor Tzuo Law, is now a student-run weekly meeting in which graduate students choose interesting and influential recent research papers. At each meeting, one student presents the paper of the week, while the others ask questions, with the common goal of understanding the research and its implications at a deep level. The Industrial Organization group is forming similar institutions. These field-specific groups complement the department-wide Dissertation Workshop discussed earlier.
Attachments (if available)