New Option Rep

Professor Robert Sherman is the new undergraduate option rep for economics.  Bob has a PhD in statistics from Yale, and has been on the faculty at Caltech since 1996.  Before that he worked for the phone company (Bellcore).

Professor Sherman is now the person to go to for all your economics option shopping needs.  His office is in 119 Baxter and his e-mail is sherman@hss.caltech.edu.

This is my last official post as the option rep, and I am giving Bob the keys to the blog. —KCB

Welcome Chris Shannon

I am delighted to let you know that Chris Shannon, the Richard N. Merkin Professor of Economics and Mathematics, arrived a few weeks ago as the newest member of the social science faculty.  Her office, which is still being renovated, is 325 Baxter.

Professor Shannon was an undergraduate economics and mathematics major at Kansas and a graduate student at Stanford.  She comes to us from Berkeley, where she was an award-winning teacher and a distinguished researcher.   One of her Ph.D. students there was our own Professor Echenique.  She has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Tilburg, Copenhagen, and Caltech, and she is a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Her specialty, as you might guess from her title, is mathematical economics.  As a graduate student at Stanford, she opened the field known as "monotone comparative statics," which uses lattice-theoretic methods instead of calculus to sign the effects of changes in exogenous variables.  Lately she has worked on decision theory with incomplete preferences.  In the spring she will be teaching an advanced graduate seminar (SS 211c).

Visiting Faculty

One of the ways universities speed the diffusion of knowledge is through the practice of hosting visiting faculty members.  Here are some of our visitors for AY 2010–2011.

Rabah Amir, the Eller Professor of Economics of at the University of Arizona, will teach Ec 105 (Industrial Organization) in the winter.

Richard Green is the Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Economics and Management in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.  He will teach a new course, BEM/Ec 187 (Corporation Finance and Financial Intermediaries), in the spring. BEM 103 is a prerequisite.

Chris Shannon, Professor of Economics and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, will be a visiting Moore Scholar next year, probably in the fall.  She will not have any teaching responsibilities.

Ken Winston is the Chief Risk Officer for Western Asset Management. He has a B.S. from Caltech (1973) and a Ph.D. from MIT in mathematics.  He will teach a new course, BEM 111 (Risk Management), in the spring.  Prerequisites are are BEM 103 and 105.

Faculty Comings and Goings

Previously I mentioned the semi-retirement of Professor Grether. There will be a number of other changes to the faculty over the summer.

Departures:
Several members of the social science faculty will be leaving at the end of this academic year.  Wish them bon voyage.

Chris Chambers is leaving to join the department of economics at the University of California, San Diego.

Jacob Goeree, who has been on leave this year, is leaving for the University of Zürich.

Matias Iaryczower is leaving to join the department of politics at Princeton University.

Matt Spitzer is leaving to join the law school at the University of Texas (Austin).

Arrivals:
We have hired two new members of the economics faculty who will start next fall:

Marina Agranov will be coming to us as an assistant professor with a Ph.D. from NYU.  Marina's interests are economic theory, political economy and political science, experimental and behavioral economics

Ben Gillen will also be coming to us as an assistant professor with his Ph.D. from UCSD. Ben's interests are in applied econometrics, industrial organization, financial economics, game theory, and behavioral economics.

More to come?

We still have two offers outstanding, so we may have even more arrivals by fall.  Soon I will let you know about visiting faculty next year,and also about new courses, and schedule anomalies.

David Grether to be promoted to Professor Emeritus

David Grether, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Economics, is being promoted to Professor Emeritus at the end of the academic year, which is academic-speak for semi-retiring.  That is, Dave will continue to have an office and do his thing, but he will no longer teach and no longer draw a salary.  (The term emeritus is Latin for "fully merited" and was originally applied to retired Roman soldiers.)

Dave earned his B.S. at the University of California, spent some time in the U.S. Army, and earned his Ph.D. at Stanford. After a brief stint at Yale he came to Caltech in 1970.  I first met him in Alan Sweezy's macroeconomics class in 1971 or '72.  We had been told by Professor Sweezy that there would be a guest lecturer, so I was not too surprised to find that a very young and sleep-deprived-appearing graduate student from another department showed up to attend.  It turns out I was wrong—the apparent graduate student was actually Professor Grether, who proceeded to talk about the identification problem in econometrics.

Dave's dissertation was in time-series econometrics, but his interests were much broader than that.  He collaborated with John Ferejohn and Charles Plott on social choice theory in the early 1970s and in the the late 1970s he and Plott conducted experiments on how real people update their beliefs when given new information, making him a pioneer in what later became known as "behavioral economics."  Dave was also a pioneer in what later became known as "neuroeconomics," when he began using fMRI to study subjects making decisions under uncertainty.  His work was the first (or maybe the second, I'm not sure) to use fMRI to study economic decision making.  I recall the excitement that Dave exhibited when he showed off some brain scans and said, more or less, "We've found greed."

Dave also served as Chairman of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 1982 to 1992 and again in 2006–2007, making him the third longest-serving chair, after Clinton Judy and Hallett Smith.

On a personal level, Dave is also known for his thriftiness and his quick and extremely dry wit.  He is also a fan of the Golden Bears.

Public Lecture on the Financial Crisis

Brad Cornell will give two public lectures as part of the Citizens Business Bank and CitizensTrust Distinguished Lectures on Economics and Finance, at 8:00 pm on Thursday, April 29 and Thursday, May 20.   The topics are:

Better Late Than Never: Social Science Faculty on Video

A number of social science faculty members have given Watson Lectures that are available on Caltech's Streaming Theater.  Here are some of the past ones.