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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
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Katherine Theyson |
Curriculum Vitae
Research
Teaching
Links
Katherine Theyson Department of Economics 107 Gardner Hall, CB#3305 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3305 Phone: 919-773-6186 Email: ktheyson@email.unc.edu
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Research
My area of specialization is International Trade and Development. While I have interests in both areas, my research thus far has focused more on issues of development.
Recently my research has focused issues of development among colonist settlers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. In this research I a utilizing a dataset collected by the Carolina Population Center under a grant from NASA. The issues I am investigating include deforestation, the roles of women, employment, property rights and household welfare.
"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind." "I would rather be vaguely right, than precisely wrong." "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" "Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions." "...the real world is not as rational and dynamically optimal as economists would like to believe." "It is universally appreciated, I think, that theorists are able to tweak their assumptions in order to reach any conclusion they wish. The believability of the conclusion depends not only on the fact that it was reached but on how hard the theorist had to tweak the model to get there."
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