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Economics Professor Presented Paper at Boston Conference

Posted on Friday, March 28, 2008

Dr. David Cushman, Westminster College professor of economics and chair of Economics and Business Department, presented "VAR Estimation of a Simple Portfolio Balance Model for the Canadian-U.S. Exchange Rate" at the Eastern Economic Association annual conference March 7 in Boston.

"A line of work I have been pursuing for several years involves the effects of U.S. and Canadian national and international debt on the Canadian-U.S dollar exchange rate, and a paper I published last summer represents one version of this work," Cushman said. "But the premise of this updated paper is that a simpler model may actually perform better over time, as economies change, than the more complicated model in the Review of Financial Economics paper."

The approach in this paper bears out this premise, according to Cushman, because it explains exchange rate behavior better over a longer period of time than the earlier paper did. The conference paper indicates that recent declines in Canadian debt have played a more important role than recent increases in U.S. debt in the current fall of the U.S. dollar against the Canadian dollar. The most recent paper includes three years of additional data and all econometrics were redone.

Cushman, who holds the Captain William McKee Chair of Economics and Business, has been with Westminster since 2005. He earned an undergraduate degree from Stetson University and a master's and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.

Before coming to Westminster, he taught at the University of New Orleans, the University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt University, the University of South Florida, and the University of Saskatchewan (Canada).

Contact Cushman at (724) 946-7169 or e-mail cushmado@westminster.edu for additional information. 

Dr. David Cushman