What first drew you to teaching and to AUP?

I’d always wished to teach economics at a liberal arts college and help students see it as a powerful tool for understanding the world around them and making decisions in their lives. My first objective as a professor is to wake students up, spark their curiosity, and challenge them to think about pressing, real-world, economic issues.

I was first drawn to AUP because it’s not a typical liberal arts college. Not only is it an urban, independent, international university, located at the meeting point of France, Europe, and the world, but it also boasts an extremely diverse student body, where every individual brings his/her cultural background, language, and perspective to the classroom.

What inspired your interest in the field of economics?

For me, economics is about our world: it’s current, it’s changing, and it’s always interesting. It’s the subject that allows you to study Apple’s and Microsoft’s methods of competition one day and the environment and pollution permits the next. It’s about how we behave, how businesses behave, and how the government behaves. It teaches us how to make well-informed decisions: what should the government do to cut the budget deficit? What should a business do to raise profit margins?

What makes teaching economics at a school like AUP unique?

AUP offers you the unique combination of a diverse student body, an interconnected and interdependent working environment, and a very collegial community, where the low student-teacher ratio allows for more personal and longer-lasting relationships with students. AUP also welcomes innovative teaching techniques, which makes it the ideal home for an energetic community of scholars and students, who can take advantage of a wide range of study trips and research collaborations with other universities and economic organizations located in Paris.

What do you hope to instill in your students when it comes to the study of economics?

I hope that my students leave with the understanding that economics isn’t just looking at graphs, analyzing statistics and predicting growth: it’s also an invaluable source of knowledge on how the world works and trains students to think critically and make well-informed decisions.

Given the current global, political climate, what aspects of economics do you think are sometimes neglected by politicians and/or citizens?

There’s obviously no single answer but I can identify a few:

• the rapid growth of the world’s population and its changing distribution;
• the persistence of widespread poverty;
• the growing pressures placed on the environment by the worldwide spread of industry;
• the continued denial of democracy, violations of human rights, and the rise of ethnic and religious conflicts and violence;
• income, wealth and gender disparities;
• the very notion of “development” in terms of what it has come to mean and how it is measured.

It’s essential that we adjust our thinking so that we acknowledge the ways in which these problems intersect and recognize the fundamental need to develop a new perspective rooted in sustainability.

Where would you like to take your research next? How does your research affect your teaching and vice versa?

I will continue my international finance work and I’m planning on collaborating with my University of New Hampshire co-authors on future projects. I think students need and deserve instructors who keep up-to-date in their fields and my research allows me to find new and illuminating angles of interpretation as I revise my curricula and reading assignments and provide my students with a broader viewpoint that incorporates current theories and research. I often use empirical evidence to help my students connect abstract economic ideas to the real world.

How does the study of economics lend itself to interdisciplinary study and research?  

Economists typically examine questions that are also being investigated in other disciplines, but with different analytical frameworks and methodologies, so an interdisciplinary approach seems rather natural. For example, as economists work to understand the causes and consequences of unemployment, pollution, education, and health care, they must also consider the psychological, sociological, moral, and political dimensions inherent to each of these issues. Meanwhile, a number of economic research studies into a wide range of questions are now informed by insights from other disciplines, which suggests that in the research sphere, economists believe the gains of interdisciplinary evaluation are greater than the costs.