Program Faculty

The core faculty associated with the program are four current members of the Economics Department plus one new member who is expected to join the department in Fall 2004. In teaching the courses designated for the certificate, these faculty will be joined by outside economists who are experts in forecasting. In addition, a number of faculty from other departments at the University are affiliated with the forecasting programs.

Professor Kajal Lahiri, an internationally recognized forecasting expert, has agreed to spearhead the departmental effort to set up the certificate program and teach some of the core forecasting courses.

Core Faculty:

Kajal Lahiri is Professor of Economics and Health Policy Management & Behavior, and he is the Director of the Econometric Research Institute. He has been at the university since 1976 and has supervised over 35 doctoral dissertations. Dr. Lahiri is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Econometrics, the International Journal of Forecasting, Empirical Economics, and Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, and is the author of numerous articles and books dealing with forecasting. He has extensive research experience with the IMF, the World Bank, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Terrence Kinal is Professor of Economics and Associate Director of the Econometric Research Institute. He has published many papers on econometric analysis and forecasting and has extensive consulting experience. His research interests include regional forecasting and properties of econometric estimators.

Thad Mirer is Associate Professor of Economics. He is the author of Economic Statistics and Econometrics, which covers these subjects at an introductory level. His empirical research has been in the areas of labor economics and the distribution of income, and he is currently interested in Social Security and the behavior of retired persons.

Jae-Young Kim is Associate Professor of Economics. He is a well-known time series econometrician whose recent work has dealt with problems of structural breaks in non-stationary variables and of model selection. He has experience working with multi-country data on foreign trade flows with special reference to East Asian countries.

Ozgen Sayginsoy will join the faculty in Fall 2004 as a new Assistant Professor of Economics specializing in time series econometrics.

Affiliated Professionals:

Donald J. Boyd, Ph.D., is the director of the Fiscal Studies Program at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The Fiscal Studies Program provides practical independent research about state and local government finances in the 50 states. His past positions include Director of the economic and revenue staff for the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

Denis Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., is Senior Fiscal Policy Analyst, New York State Division of the Budget. He developed the so-called “KPSS test,” a widely used statistic for testing the null of stationarity in time series. He has taught monetary policy, econometrics, and time series at Central Michigan University and Fordham University.

Robert L. Megna, M.S., is the head of the Economic and Revenue Unit of the New York State Division of the Budget. He has been leading groups forecasting State revenues for 15 years and has written articles on forecasting and state tax policy. He is responsible for revenue projections used in the State Budget and heads the team that develops and monitors the revenue side of the State Financial Plan. Mr. Megna also worked as an economist for AT&T, forecasting telecommunications demand.

Qiang Xu, Ph.D., is Chief Econometrician & Director of Research, New York State Division of the Budget. Among his responsibilities is to forecast national and state economic conditions for use in the Executive Budget process and to promote development of the State's economy. He also advises the Division of Budget staff in regard to the formulation and risks underlying the State's revenue forecast. His research interests are in Time Series Analysis, Macroeconomic Modeling, and Forecasting.

Affiliated Faculty:

Rita Biswas is Associate Professor of Finance and Chair, Department of Finance. Her primary teaching areas are international finance, financial markets and institutions, financial management and advanced corporate finance topics. Her most recent publication titled, "An Application of Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms to the Risk-Return Tradeoff in Bank Loan Portfolio Management," has been published in International Transactions in Operations Research.

Glenn Deane is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research. Deane's demographic interests are in the areas of multiple race identifications, population and environment, spatial processes, and historical demography. He is also interested in research methodology, including error dependence, missing value imputation, spatial lags, and methods for pooled cross-sectional analysis.

Nancy A. Denton is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the State University of New York at Albany. Her major research interests are race and residential segregation, and she is the author of numerous articles on the topic. Together with Douglas S. Massey she is the author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, winner of the 1995 American Sociological Association Distinguished Publication Award and the 1994 Otis Dudley Duncan award from the Sociology of Population section of the American Sociological Association.

Diane Dewar is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior, and in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on how public policy shapes the organization and financing of health services, and how the decisions by persons and providers about health utilization are then influenced by these policy changes. Currently, most of her work concerns the impacts of changes in reimbursement systems. She has received research funding from sources such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.