StFX economics professor Dr. Greg Tkacz is having a banner year: he has received several national research grants, has been invited to present his work at numerous conferences, and has been appointed to two prestigious associations.
Dr. Tkacz is the recipient of two SSHRC grants, totaling almost $45,000. The first, a Standard Research Grant, and the second, an Insight Development Grant, will look at the research agendas, "Short-run macroeconomic forecasting" and "How should monetary policy respond to financial stress?" respectively.
“The first agenda tries to improve the forecasts of important macroeconomic variables, such as GDP growth and inflation, by monitoring electronic data on debit and credit card transactions that had previously never been used in the literature,” Dr. Tkacz says.
“The second agenda will try to help policymakers improve their responses to financial disturbances by studying the timing and magnitude of interest rate changes required to dampen financial turbulence or crises.”
Dr. Greg Tkacz
The work has already garnered much attention. He has been invited to present at institutions and events across the country: at Dalhousie University; the Atlantic Association of Applied Economists; the Bank of Canada Workshop on Nowcasting and Short-Term Forecasting; and at Mount Allison University. He also presented his research in June at the annual meeting of the Canadian Economics Association in Ottawa.
Student Opportunities
Not only will the SSHRC funding help him advance his research, the grants also allow him to hire full-time summer research assistants over the next three years. This presents great opportunities for students. This past summer, John Walsh, who graduated from StFX with an honours degree in economics, worked for Dr. Tkacz. Mr. Walsh is now pursuing his master's degree at Queen's University.
Dr. Tkacz is also happy to note that interest in economics in general is up with a noticeable jump in enrolment this year for courses at all levels.
More recently, Dr. Tkacz was appointed an Associate Fellow at CIRANO, which is a Montreal-based inter-university research centre that specializes in areas such as finance, experimental economics and public policy.
Dr. Tkacz is the only member of that centre from Atlantic Canada, and the only one from a primarily undergraduate Canadian university. Other Fellows are from PhD granting institutions, with about 20 per cent of the Fellows holding endowed chairs at their universities.
“Being associated with this centre will provide me with research space in Montreal, access to the top researchers in the field, graduate school contacts for our students, and the possibility of publishing my papers in CIRANO's Working Paper series.”
In June, he began a three-year term on the executive council of the Canadian Economics Association (CEA), which represents more than 1,500 academic and professional economists across the country. At this time he is the only member from Atlantic Canada on the 12-member board.
Prior to joining StFX in 2010, Dr. Tkacz spent more than a dozen years at the Bank of Canada. His most recent duties involved providing direct policy advice to Governor Mark Carney and the rest of the Bank's Governing Council through the use of alternative models that his team developed.