About
I’m a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the economics department at Kansas State University. I also have an alternative life as co-editor of the journal Energy Economics.
My research areas are macroeconomics and energy economics. I mostly work with time series data, a bad habit that can be traced back to my grad school days, when I wrote a dissertation under the direction of Norman Swanson.
Most of my published research has in some way involved at least one of energy price data or macroeconomic forecasting. I think of myself as a macroeconomist, since that’s mostly what I read and study, but energy price shocks (in particular large movements in gasoline and oil prices) provide good data to learn about inflation and the business cycle. My involvement with Energy Economics sometimes leads others (mostly grad students) to ask me to join them as a coauthor on papers related to “traditional” energy topics like DEA analysis, global warming, energy policy, and so on. While these are important topics, they are far outside my expertise, so I politely decline all such invitations.
In recent years I’ve been teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics (ECON 510) and Economic Forecasting (ECON 686) at the undergraduate level. At the graduate level, I’ve been teaching PhD core econometrics courses (ECON 830 and 930), Time Series Econometrics (ECON 935) and Macroeconometrics (ECON 910). I have also taught Principles of Macroeconomics, International Trade, International Finance, and Monetary Economics at various points in my career, but I have not done so recently and do not currently have plans to teach those courses again.
I finished my PhD in Economics at Texas A&M University in 2002. My first job was as an assistant professor in the economics department at East Carolina University from 2002 to 2004. I was a visiting professor in the economics department at 서강대학교 in 2012.