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’ve done empirical analysis of time series data for most of my career, a bad habit that can be traced back to my grad school days, when I wrote a dissertation under the direction of Norman Swanson. This has changed in recent years due to changes in the profession. I’ve been doing more work with DSGE models and cross-sectional data. A majority of the published papers I read these days do not analyze time series datasets.
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 (that’s 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.
I teach two undergraduate courses, though not every year:
- Intermediate Macroeconomics
- Economic Forecasting
I teach three graduate courses, at least once in a while:
- PhD core econometrics II (2004-2013, 2015, 2018, 2026)
- Energy Market Forecasting (MA/PhD)
- Macroeconometrics (PhD field course)
These are the courses I used to teach, but the department no longer offers them or no longer needs me to teach them:
- International Trade (last taught in 2003 at East Carolina)
- Principles of Macroeconomics (last taught in 2008)
- Graduate International Finance (last taught in 2010)
- Graduate Monetary Economics (last taught in 2005)
- PhD core econometrics I (last taught in 2018)
- PhD Time Series Econometrics (last taught in 2023, that course has been replaced with Energy Market Forecasting)
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.