Tim Bollerslev: I have two papers coming out in the March issues of Econometrica and the American Economic Review: “Modeling and Forecasting Realized Volatility” (with Torben G. Andersen, Francis X. Diebold, and Paul Labys), Econometrica, 2003; and “Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange” (with Torben G. Andersen, Francis X. Diebold, and Clara Vega), American Economic Review, 2003.
Philip Cook: My new book with Jens Ludwig (Duke Ph.D., 1994), Evaluating Gun Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2003), is an edited collection of original articles by economists that address various aspects of gun violence and policy. It includes two articles by Professor Ludwig and me. One of them provides new estimates of the effect of widespread gun ownership on burglary rates and patterns. These estimates utilized protected federal data, made available through the Triangle Census Research Data Center, which is housed in the economics department.
William Darity Jr.: I have four projects underway. (1) In conjunction with Yuwi Manachotphong, who served as my undergraduate research assistant during the fall term 2002, I am investigating whether there is a Kuznets-like relationship for intergroup disparity using pooled cross-section and time series international data. (2) With funding from the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Art Goldsmith at William and Mary and Darrick Hamilton at New School University, I am examining the relationship between skin shade and labor market outcomes in the United States. As an adjunct to this study we are also exploring the effects of workplace composition and dynamics on worker productivity. (3) With support from the Spencer Foundation, in collaboration with Karolyn Tyson in sociology at UNC–Chapel Hill and Domini Castellino in public policy at Duke, I am pursuing a study called “Effective Schools, Effective Students.” Our study identifies public schools in North Carolina where black students are high performing and seeks to isolate the factors contributing to their success with an eye towards identifying what might be replicable elsewhere. We also identify black students who are high achievers regardless of where they are in school, again trying to identify the factors that contribute to their success in hopes of establishing similar conditions for other students. (4) I also am building a research program on reparations for African Americans. As a part of this initiative I have been working on a project with Dania Frank at Harvard projecting the effects of a reparations program on racial income inequality in the United States from the standpoint of the venerable transfer problem in international trade theory. This project also entails examination of the sources of racial wealth disparity and considers reparations as an avenue for closing the racial wealth gap.
Lori Leachman: My current research explores the relationship between financial assets and their implications for financial market integration, as well as the relationships between systems of macro-variables and the implications of those relationships for capital mobility and intertemporal solvency. That work evolved from an early consideration of cointegration analysis, which is a method for assessing the long-run equilibrium relationship(s) between a system of variables. Let me say that, after teaching economics for over twenty years now, I am more convinced than ever that my discipline is one of the most essential and dynamic areas of study for a young adult. Each semester I tell my students that presumably they will earn a paycheck, read a paper and vote, at least occasionally. Therefore they need a basic understanding of economic principles, vocabulary, thought processes and models. In every course I teach I strive to provide just that.
Curtis Taylor: I am working on a project involving the economics of personal privacy that is being sponsored by the National Science Foundation. My current research investigates the incentives for firms to collect information about prospective customers and/or employees in competitive market settings. My findings show that if the level of information acquisition is not contractible, then firms such as insurance underwriters, banks, and landlords often will acquire too much information about prospective customers from the perspective of economic efficiency.
Ed Tower: I am currently working on the stock market and protectionism. Matt Harney (B.S. Duke, 2002) and I, in “Rational Pessimism: Predicting Equity Returns Using Tobin’s q and Price/Earnings Ratios” (Journal of Investment, forthcoming), discover that q beats all variants of the PE ratio for predicting real rates of return for the S&P 500 index. We also make some predictions. In another article, Ryan Gibbs (B.A. Duke, 2002), Omer Gokcekus (Ph.D. Duke, 1994) and I, in “Is Talk Cheap? Buying Congressional Testimony with Campaign Contributions” (The Journal of Policy Reform, 2002), find for the steel import quota bill of 1999 that each word in the Congressional Record in favor of the bill cost $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry over the previous election cycle. Consequently, the answer to the question posed in the title is “Yes.”
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