Spring 2008 Newsletter

Economics Scholars Program: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Austin College Team Up for Economics Conference

Austin College and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas are pleased to announce the 2008 Economics Scholars Program (formerly the Undergraduate Economics Scholars Conference). Undergraduate students at all levels are invited to discuss their independent and faculty co-sponsored work in any area associated with economics. Papers and discussants in the fields of applied economics, econometrics, history, or pedagogy are welcome. Undergraduate students from all geographic areas are welcome and encouraged to apply.

There is no registration fee for presenters, discussants, session chairs, and general audience members. The conference will take place on Friday, March 28th 2008 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Lunch and free parking will be provided thanks to the generosity of the Dallas Fed; however, all students and faculty sponsors are responsible for all travel costs. Melanie Fox-Kean, Assistant Professor of Economics, is organizing the event.

More information about the fund can be found at www.austincollege.edu/esp.

Williams Student Investment Fund Update

The launch in September of the Williams Student Managed Investment Fund weathered the volatility of the markets in recent months. With a return of 2.6% since its inception, the fund outperformed the S&P 500. Apple (AAPL) led the growth of the corpus with a return of 39% as of December 31, 2007. Other strong performers included Wellpoint (WLP) and Proctor & Gamble (PG) with returns of 11.25% and 4.59%, respectively.

Zeke Ashton ’95, founder of Centaur Capital Partners and former Motley Fool contributor, has continued to provide valuable insight and guidance for the Fund, meeting with the students on several occasions. The Fund’s first fiscal year will end on March 31, 2008. A mid-year report was required by the students as their Fall semester final examination and is available publicly online.

The $1 million Todd A. Williams Student Managed Investment Fund was established by Mr. Williams, a 1982 graduate of Austin College and partner at Goldman, Sachs & Company, to promote investment education and increase funding for scholarships. The fund has an investment objective of an eight percent annualized return over a three-year rolling period, with any annual income above the fund’s initial $1 million corpus used to create new endowed scholarships honoring long term Austin College faculty and staff.

More information about the fund can be found at: http://www.austincollege.edu/NewsDetail.asp?NewsID=1262&ItemID=5326.

The 2008 Will Mann Richardson Lecture

The Department of Economics and Business invited James K. Galbraith to give this year’s Will Mann Richardson lecture entitled “Globalization and Inequality.” Dr. Galbraith is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The lecture was held on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 in Hoxie Thompson Auditorium, Sherman Hall at Austin College.

Dr. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School.

Galbraith has co-authored two textbooks, The Economic Problem with the late Robert L. Heilbroner and Macroeconomics with William Darity, Jr. He is the author of Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (1989) and Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (1998). His most recent book, Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (Cambridge University Press, 2001), is coedited with Maureen Berner and features contributions from six LBJ School Ph.D. students.

Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column called "Econoclast" for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is an occasional commentator for Public Radio.

The Will Mann Richardson Lectureships & Seminars were endowed by gifts from Will Mann Richardson and his wife, Gertrude Anne Windsor Richardson; his mother-in-law, Gertrude Buckley Windsor; and his children, William Windsor Richardson, John Marshall Richardson, Gertrude Windsor Richardson, and James Windsor Richardson. The purpose of the fund is to bring outstanding individuals to campus to discuss pertinent issues in economics, banking, law, and government.

More information about the fund can be found at:
http://www.austincollege.edu/NewsDetail.asp?NewsID=1371&ItemID=6318.

Student Research

Seniors Geoff Wescott and Will Radke presented their research at the Eastern Economics Association Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on March 9, 2008.

Geoff’s research examines the effects of language ability (Bilingual vs. English Dominant) on the income of Latino-Americans. Geoff’s research involved observing regressions of data from a 2002 and 2006 survey of Latinos living within the United States. From the information obtained by the regressions, he also researched the economic incentive for a self-employed Latino to learn English versus the incentive to learn Spanish, if he/she is not bilingual. The information found through previous academic research combined with the regression data will provide a basis for further discussion of the economic dynamics of self-employed Latinos, i.e. strengths and weaknesses of current policies and social dilemmas.

Will Radke will be presenting on his research from China this summer on Chinese intellectual property in relation to counterfeit and pirated goods. As a Mellon Fellow, he interviewed intellectual property experts both in the United States and China regarding a type of infringement not documented in any academic journals. This infringement, called third shift goods, is produced with specific, often illegal knowledge of the intellectual property, whereas pure counterfeiting has no direct or inside knowledge of the intellectual property. Since a third shift good is a counterfeit with real expertise and mostly seen with licensed products where the licensor typically has little control or oversight at the factory, it can be distinguished from gray market activity, parallel imports, and manufacturing overruns.

Recent Job Placements and Internships

Seniors Geoff Wescott and Will Radke have accepted permanent positions with the Archon Group, a 100% subsidiary of Goldman, Sachs & Co. focused on real estate investment and asset management. Geoff will be based within the Dallas-area office while Will will be based in the Singapore office focused on investments in non-Japan Asia.

Fatima White ’07 accepted a position with NBC Universal as part of their financial management program. This summer, senior Julia Pfeffer will join Avelo Mortgage (also a Goldman Sachs subsidiary), while Jeffrey Fritts ’07 has recently joined Bechtel. Finally, Jonathan Jacobs ’07 began work as an analyst at Real Time Resolutions.

Alumni Profiles

With each newsletter we attempt to highlight a number of AC graduates in the business or economics fields who have been enjoying meaningful success and have expressed a willingness to mentor and counsel other AC students on career and graduate school choices. This edition highlights the following alumni:

Margaret-Ann Splawn ’88 is based in London as a credit derivatives broker for GFI Group, an inter-dealer brokerage service firm providing services in a multitude of global cash and derivative markets, for the past four years. After graduating from Austin College with a B.A. in Political Science and French, she moved to Paris and worked for Finacor, an inter-dealer broker. She worked on the Interest Rate Swap desk there for two years. In 1990, she had the opportunity to move to Madrid, Spain to help create the Euro bond and Interest Rate Swap desk for the brokerage firm C.M. Capital Markets. In 1993, she was approached by Bank One (which was acquired by JP Morgan Chase) to work in London and set up their Interbank dealing desk for the Interest Rate Department. Ms Splawn worked for Eurobrokers in London (now BGC Partners) from 1998-2002 as an Interest Rate Options Broker. In 2002, Ms Splawn changed direction and moved to Credit Derivatives when she was approached to set up an emerging market credit default swap desk for CreditTrade (now CreditEx) in London before moving to GFI Group in 2003.

Greg W. Gitcho ’99 serves as Vice President of Acquisitions for Austin, Texas-based Cypress Real Estate Advisors, a private equity real estate investment firm. Mr. Gitcho is responsible for investment acquisitions and plays an important role in asset management. Before joining Cypress, Mr. Gitcho was a Senior Associate with AIG’s Global Real Estate Investment Group in New York City. Mr. Gitcho received his undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Political Science from Austin College; and earned a Masters of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his post-graduate studies, Mr. Gitcho worked for five years developing single family residential communities in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Joe Fox ’00 is a portfolio manager for KMS Ventures, a family office for the Austin-based Kozmetsky family. KMS invests in various asset classes to include a directly managed “deep value” hedge fund and fund of funds. Prior to joining KMS, Mr. Fox was a Senior Portfolio Analyst for three start up hedge funds including include Prospect Management Advisors (affiliate of Highland Capital), Wrangler Capital Management and Ranger Arbitrage. Joe began his career as an investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers in the energy group. Mr. Fox graduated magna cum laude from Austin College with a double major in German and Economics.

Luke Mallinson ’94 is a Senior Manager with Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. He leads technology architecture projects with a focus on Service Oriented Architectures for clients in the telecom, healthcare, and resources industries. Luke, who over the years has been a strong advocate internally within Accenture for hiring Austin College students, graduated from AC in 1994 with a degree in Economics and Computer Science. He attended the London School of Economics in 1993 and earned an M.B.A. from the University of Dallas in 2001.

Christopher Stallsworth ’03 is a senior Associate with Archon Hospitality, a 100% affiliate of Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he currently provides asset management oversight for more than $700 million of hotel investments located throughout the U.S. owned by Goldman Sachs-sponsored private equity funds. Previously from 2003 through 2006, Chris served as a Financial Analyst with Archon Group Deutschland, also a 100% GS&Co. affiliate, in their Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich offices. While in Germany, he supported the investment management of more than $8 billion of retail, residential and commercial real estate assets located throughout the country.

Alumni in the News

Watch Brandon Willard ’05, Chief Operating Officer of DisplayPoints, Inc. discuss his new venture: http://www.kvue.com/video/index.html?nvid=215876.

Faculty Research

Jeff Czajkowski, Assistant Professor in Economics, presented his hurricane evacuation research at Texas A&M and again at the Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November 2007. He was invited to Texas A&M by their Agricultural Economics Department and their Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center. Finally, Jeff has been awarded a one-year research grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) via Florida International University's International Hurricane Research Center to continue this research.

Associate Professor of Business Administration David Griffith and Ouachita Baptist University Associate Professor Bryan McKinney presented a paper entitled “Can Heather Gillette Save YouTube: Internet Service Providers and Copyright Liability” at the International Association for Computer Information Systems (IACIS) Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada in October 2007. The paper was subsequently published in Issues in Information Systems. The paper is available online at http://www.iacis.org/iis/2007_iis/PDFs/Griffith_McKinney.pdf.

Melanie Fox-Kean, Assistant Professor of Economics, chaired two sessions and attended the Southern Economic Association Conference, formalized the 2008 Economics Scholars Program (formerly the Undergraduate Economics Scholars Conference), which will be a reoccurring, yearly event.

Danny Nuckols, Associate Professor of Economics, attended the Eastern Economic Association conference in New York City in January, the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics in Salt Lake City, Utah in May, and the Missouri Valley Economic Association in Kansas City in October.

Department Chair and Associate Professor of Economics, Kevin Simmons, presented a paper at the University of Reading in England in the summer of 2007. He also presented at Northern Illinois University in January of this year and the Eastern Economics Association conference in New York City in March of 2007 where he also chaired a session. He had three publications this past year and already has two for 2008. He also has secured funding from various insurance companies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support his various research interests.

Stay Connected!

One of the most influential ways to give back is by mentoring current students:

Can you provide Internships? Experiential learning provides the hands-on learning often missing in the classroom. Would you be interesting in hosting Austin College students as interns during the semester, Jan-Term, or the summer?

Mentor Current Students? Whether considering graduate school or entering the workforce, sharing your journey with current students helps bring a more grounded transition into the next stages of their life.

Occasionally Reviewing Resumes? With resumes flying around all the time, can you spend a few seconds to provide some invaluable tips?

Mock Interviews? After the resume has opened the door to interviews, it’s time to face the make-or-break interview. That pressure and adrenaline are difficult to re-create but often provide that competitive advantage.

If you can help with any of these opportunities, please contact Career Services at 903-813-2247 and ask to speak with Margie Norman, Director of Career Services, or Viki Reeder, Assistant Director of Career Services and Internship Coordinator.

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For more information about the department, please visit the
Business Administration Web page at http://www.austincollege.edu/Category.asp?635
and the Economics Web page at http://www.austincollege.edu/Category.asp?675

Fall 2007 Newsletter (pdf)

Archived: Fall 2007 Newsletter (pdf)