Faculty and Staff

Sherrilyn M. Billger

 

(Ph.D. University of Illinois) is an Assistant Professor of Economics whose research focuses on topics in labor economics, education, and applied econometrics. Her work on single-sex education and on incentive pay for teachers and administrators has been presented before the American Education Finance Association, Society of Labor Economists, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Her research appears in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor Research, Industrial Relations, Developments in School Finance, and Applied Economics Letters and has been funded by the USDA National Research Initiative. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College and has been named a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.

Lon Carlson

 

(Ph.D. University of Illinois) is an Associate Professor and the Undergraduate Program Director for the Department of Economics. His research on environmental economics and economics education has appeared in several outlets including Natural Resources Journal and the Journal of Economic Education. He has also co-authored numerous research reports on issues concerning environmental economics and a principles of economics text. He has held positions at Argonne National Laboratory and the U.S. General Accounting Office, and has worked as a consultant for a number of government agencies. Professor Carlson teaches courses in environmental economics, law and economics, and principles of economics.

Ray Cohn

 

(Ph.D. University of Oregon) is a Professor of Economics with research interests in Economic History and International Migration. His work appears in the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Social Science History, International Journal of Maritime History and several other academic outlets. Professor Cohn is a frequently invited presenter at the Economic History Association, Social Science History Association, and in the economic history workshops at Northwestern University, Indiana University and the University of Chicago. Professor Cohn teaches International Economics, American Economic History and Principles of Economics.

Rajeev K. Goel

 

(Ph.D. University of Houston) is a Professor of Economics and author of Economic Models of Technological Change. His research in industrial organization, tobacco economics, economics of corruption and applied microeconomics appears in numerous academic outlets including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Kyklos, Managerial and Decision Economics, Research Policy, Economic Development and Cultural Change and Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. Professor Goel serves on the editorial boards of three journals and has held positions at the Indian Institute of Management, Tata Energy Research Institute and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

David G. Loomis

 

(Ph.D. Temple University), Associate Professor, is Executive Director of the Institute for Regulatory Policy Studies. His work as part of the Wind Energy Team has received support through the U.S. Department of Energy. His research publications appear in the Review of Industrial Organization, Information Economics and Policy, International Journal of Forecasting, and Journal of Economic Education. He is the co-editor with Lester Taylor of two books, The Future of the Telecommunications Industry: Forecasting and Demand Analysis and Forecasting the Internet: Understanding the Explosive Growth of Data Communications. Professor Loomis teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in telecommunications, regulatory policy and applied economics.

Hassan Mohammadi

 

(Ph.D. Washington State University) is a Professor of Economics and Director of Graduate Programs. His areas of specialty include macroeconomics, economics of financial markets and intermediaries, and applied econometrics. His research on business cycles, and fiscal and monetary policies appears in Economica Internazionale, Southern Economic Journal, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Economics Letters, and other academic outlets. He teaches graduate courses in monetary economics and advanced macroeconomics as well as undergraduate courses in money and banking, intermediate macroeconomics and principles of economics. Professor Mohammadi has done collaborative work with the United Nations and the US Department of Agriculture.

James Payne

 

(Ph.D. Florida State University) is Professor of Economics and Department Chair. His research in applied time series econometrics, financial economics, and macroeconomics appears in numerous academic outlets including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Macroeconomics, Canadian Journal of Economics, Economics Letters, Managerial and Decision Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Policy Modeling, Journal of Financial Research, Applied Economics and Applied Financial Economics. Professor Payne was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia, serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Economics and Finance and on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals. His teaching experience includes monetary economics, macroeconomics, applied econometrics, and statistics.

Rati Ram

 

(Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Distinguished Professor of Economics, the highest distinction for faculty at Illinois State University. His research on Economic Development, Human Resources and Cross-Country Studies has appeared in numerous leading journals including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics. Professor Ram was an invited contributor to the Handbook of Defense Economics, has co-authored with Nobel Laureate T. W. Schultz, and has refereed for fifty professional journals. He advised UNESCO on the development of World Education Indicators and the World Education Report (1995). He teaches courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Daniel Rich

 

(Ph.D. University of Houston) is a Professor of Economics with research and teaching interests in labor economics and applied econometrics. His research appears in the International Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, and other academic outlets. Professor Rich has served on the executive education faculty for the Northwestern University Transportation Center and as a consultant with the U.S. Department of Labor and Illinois Department of Employment Security. Courses include advanced labor economics, individual and social choice, and organizational economics.

 

Doug Schwalm

 

(Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor with research and teaching interests in Health Economics, Labor Economics and Econometrics. His work on physician and psychologist responses to ongoing changes in health care markets appears in Health Services Review and Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. Professor Schwalm has presented papers on nursing practice, miscounting the uninsured, and professional training in psychiatry before the Southern Economic Association and the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. His research has received support through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services.

Neil Thomas Skaggs

 

(Ph.D. Duke University), Professor of Economics, teaches Money and Banking, History of Economic Thought, Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Principles of Economics. Professor Skaggs' research specialty is the history of monetary economics and his work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, Southern Economic Journal and Public Choice. He has published numerous articles on the development of British monetary theory and policy in the nineteenth century and currently is working on a monograph that traces the influence of the ideas of Henry Thornton.

George A. Waters

 

( Ph.D University of North Carolina) is an Assistant Professor of Economics whose primary research interests are in Macro/Monetary Economics, Game Theory and Models of Learning. One area of his current work uses an Evolutionary Game Theory approach to show how changes in forecasting strategies among traders in asset markets can explain many features of stock market bubbles. Another topic of interest involves optimal monetary policy in an environment with potential changes in regime. Professor Waters' work appears in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and the Journal of Macroeconomics. He has a wide range of teaching experience from elementary to graduate level including courses in mathematical economics, money and banking, advanced macroeconomics, and game theory at Washington and Lee University and Illinois State University.

Kevin H. Zhang

 

(Ph.D. University of Colorado) is an Associate Professor of Economics whose research focuses on foreign direct investment and international trade. He is the coeditor of Financial Markets and Foreign Investment in Greater China. His work also appears in the Journal of Development Economics, China Economic Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Contemporary Economic Policy, Urban Studies, and several book chapters. Professor Zhang teaches principles of economics, international trade and international finance at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He joined Illinois State University after a year at Harvard University working as a postdoctoral fellow and as a consultant with the Harvard Institute of International Development.