Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor Agbeyegbe, Hunter College & Graduate Center.

A lecture by:
Professors Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier, Graduate Center, CUNY
“Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education”

The discussion will be based on their published book: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/austerity-blues

Overview:
Public higher education in the postwar era was a key economic and social driver in American life, making college available to millions of working men and women. Since the 1980s, however, government austerity policies and politics have severely reduced public investment in higher education, exacerbating inequality among poor and working-class students of color, as well as part-time faculty. In Austerity Blues, Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier examine these devastating fiscal retrenchments nationally, focusing closely on New York and California, both of which were leaders in the historic expansion of public higher education in the postwar years and now are at the forefront of austerity measures.

Fabricant and Brier describe the extraordinary growth of public higher education after 1945, thanks largely to state investment, the alternative intellectual and political traditions that defined the 1960s, and the social and economic forces that produced austerity policies and inequality beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s. A provocative indictment of the negative impact neoliberal policies have visited on the public university, especially the growth of class, racial, and gender inequalities, Austerity Blues also analyzes the many changes currently sweeping public higher education, including the growing use of educational technology, online learning, and privatization, while exploring how these developments hurt students and teachers. In its final section, the book offers examples of oppositional and emancipatory struggles and practices that can help reimagine public higher education in the future.

The ways in which factors as diverse as online learning, privatization, and disinvestment cohere into a single powerful force driving deepening inequality is the central theme of the book. Incorporating the differing perspectives of students, faculty members, and administrators, the book reveals how public education has been redefined as a private benefit, often outsourced to for-profit vendors who “sell” education back to indebted undergraduates. Over the past twenty years, tuition and related student debt have climbed precipitously and degree completion rates have dropped. Not only has this new austerity threatened public universities’ ability to educate students, Fabricant and Brier argue, but it also threatens to undermine the very meaning and purpose of public higher education in offering poor and working-class students access to a quality education in a democracy. Synthesizing historical sources, social science research, and contemporary reportage, Austerity Blues will be of interest to readers concerned about rising inequality and the decline of public higher education.

Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5383

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.

Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor Agbeyegbe, Hunter College & Graduate Center.

A lecture by:
Xiye Yang, Department of Economics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
“Jump Contagion in Financial Markets”

The talk will be based on two of his co-authored papers:
Testing for mutually exciting jumps and financial flights in high frequency data (link to paper)
And Testing for Self-Excitation in Jumps (link to the paper).

Date: Monday, February 6, 2017

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5383

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.

Don’t miss the following event presented with the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality:

Description:
Which U.S. colleges best help children climb the income ladder? How can we increase access to such colleges for children from low-income families? Economist Raj Chetty takes on these questions in a bold new study, pointing to public higher education as a key agent of change: CUNY alone propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses combined. Chetty joins the GC’s Presidential Professor Philip Kasinitz (Sociology); Presidential Professor Leslie McCall (Sociology and Political Science), associate director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality; and moderator David Leonhardt of The New York Times, with opening remarks by Chancellor James B. Milliken.

Read David Leonhardt: “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges” (NEW YORK TIMES 1/18/17)

Read David Leonhardt: “Budget Cuts That Are Un-American” (NEW YORK TIMES 1/19/17)

Read THE UPSHOT: “Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60” (NEW YORK TIMES 1/18/17)

WHERE:

ADMISSION:

Reservations are full; this event will be LIVE-STREAMED.

With the nation in financial crisis, U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the biggest overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression. What have the reforms accomplished, and what can be done now? He speaks with Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist, and distinguished professor in the Ph.D. Program in Economics at the Graduate Center.

Presented with the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality.

WHERE:
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue

ROOM:
C200: Proshansky Auditorium

WHEN:
December 05, 2016: 6:30 PM

CONTACT INFO:
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/publicprograms

Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor David A. Jaeger.

A lecture by: Anna Arakelyan, CUNY Graduate Center
“Who Influences Your Wealth? The Effect of Culture and Ethnic Origin, Neighborhood and Peers on Personal Income: Spatial Econometric Analysis of New York City”

Abstract of the paper:

Being a “social animal”, each person is inherently embedded into a complex structure of social relations. He has role models to aspire to, conformity rules to follow, and expectations to meet. This paper aims to find what the different social influences each person experiences in life are. Specifically, I consider how a person’s ethnic community, age reference group, occupational and industry group peers, and residential area neighbors affect his total income. I introduce a novel model of multiple social networks and discuss various identification implications. I apply the model empirically to New York City, which naturally is a very favorable environment to test for multiple social effects. The study uses generous person-level American Community Survey data that covers rich geographic, ethnic, demographic, and employment characteristics. The sample used is made of five pooled cross-sections, resulting in about 270,000 observations. I analyze a model with spatial lags in dependent variable (SAR), a model with spatial lags in disturbance term (SEM), and a model with spatial lags in both dependent variable and error (SAC). I find highly significant effects for various specifications and elaborate on many aspects of the multiple social effects model.

Author’s website: http://arakelyanag.wixsite.com/vita

Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5382

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.

Join us in the upcoming Stone Center Inequality Lecture Series at the Graduate Center.

This session consists on a seminar and discussion with Aboozar Hadavand on Wednesday, November 30 at 2:30PM-4:00PM. The seminar will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5414. The event will consist of a 30-minute seminar followed by 30-45 minutes for Q&A.

Aboozar Hadavand is a PhD candidate in Economics here at the Graduate Center. His research focuses on economic inequality, labor economics, and economics of education. His presentation will lay out the intersection of age, race, sex, and income inequality in the United States. His findings demonstrate the important differences in trends in inequality within various socio-demographic groups. His research sheds light on the effect of demographic changes on the observed rise in the Gini coefficient.

The abstract of the paper:

This paper questions how much of the existing inequality, and subsequently the increase in inequality in recent decades, is due to life-cycle differences in income. Using microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study, I calculated the respective shares of inequality that result from differences in income within and between different age groups. I find that compared to other countries, the within-cohort proportion of inequality in the U.S. is relatively high and stable. Furthermore, I analyze the evolution of inequality in various other subgroups defined by gender, educational attainment, race, and occupation. By deconstructing basic inequality statistics and figures into within and between measurements for smaller cohorts, I conduct a more granular analysis of inequality. Some of the stylized facts in this paper are: 1) between 1979-2013 there has been a greater rise in inequality within the very young and the very old age-cohorts, 2) over the same period, there has been a rise in inequality among men but a decrease in inequality among women, 3) there has been a larger rise in inequality among the highly educated as opposed to those with lower levels of education, and 4) there are significant differences in the trends of inequality within various occupational groups. I further analyze these findings and provide hypotheses that may explain them.

RSVP to njohnson@gradcenter.cuny.edu or ian.haberman@gmail.com.

This event is part of the Stone Center Inequality Lecture Series.

Learn more about the Stone Center Inequality Lecture Series at:

Inequality-Lecture-Series

Gain an informed perspective on the post-election landscape from leading thinkers on politics, economics, and international affairs.

What Now? The Roots of the Present Economic Crisis and the Way Forward

FEATURING:

Robert Brenner (visiting professor of economics, New School University) has written widely on the early development of capitalism and the current economic crisis. His many books include The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy.

David Harvey (distinguished professor, the Graduate Center) is one of the world’s most cited social scientists. He is the author of many books, including the recent The Ways of the World and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.

FREE; NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

Presented with the Advanced Research Collaborative; the Center for Place, Culture and Politics; and the Center for the Humanities.

When/Where: Thursday, December 1 / 7:00 pm / Elebash Recital Hall

The End of the World as We Know It?
The Global Rise of National Populisms

FEATURING:

Branko Milanovic, a GC professor and senior scholar at the Stone Center, studies income inequality in individual countries, globally, and among pre-industrial societies. His most recent book is Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization.

Marla Stone, a professor of history at Occidental College, focuses on 20th-century Europe with a specialization in modern Italy and genocide studies. Her most recent book is The Fascist Revolution in Italy.

Richard Wolin is distinguished professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the GC. His many books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.

Moderated by John Torpey, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

FREE; RSVP TO: eusc@gc.cuny.edu

Presented by the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies and the European Union Studies Center. Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Dankwart Rustow Fund.

When/Where: Thursday, December 8 / 6:00 pm / Skylight Room

Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor David A. Jaeger.

A lecture by: Raul Segura, CUNY Graduate Center
“The Impact of Terrorism on Mental Health and Substance Use: Evidence from the Boston Marathon Bombings”

Date: Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5382

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.

Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor David A. Jaeger.

A lecture by: Tim Roeper, CUNY Graduate Center
“Measuring Access to Affordable Higher Education and its Effect on Economic Opportunity”

Author’s website: http://timothy-roeper.squarespace.com/

Date: Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5382

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.

Join us in our upcoming Applied Economics Seminar at the Graduate Center organized by Professor David A. Jaeger.

A lecture by: Chinhui Juhn, University of Houston and NBER
“The Quantity-Quality Trade-off and the Formation of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills”

Abstract:
We estimate the impact of increases in family size on childhood and adult outcomes using matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. We find that families face a substantial quantity-quality trade-off: increases in family size decrease parental investment, decrease childhood cognitive abilities, and increase behavioral problems. The negative effects on cognitive abilities are much larger for girls while the detrimental effects on behavior are larger for boys. We also find evidence of heterogeneous effects by mother’s AFQT score, with the negative effects on cognitive scores being much larger for children of mothers with low AFQT scores.

Author’s website: http://www.uh.edu/~cjuhn/

Paper available here

Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Time: 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Room: 5382

Travel Directions to The Graduate Center:
By Subway: B, D, F, N, R, or Q to 34th Street-Herald Square; walk east to 5th Avenue 6 to 33rd Street.
By Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M16, M34, Q32.