Patrick J. Conway

Professor of Economics, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill

Participation in DITE: Cohort 1 Mentor

patrick_conway@unc.edu

Patrick Conway is Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He has been on the faculty of UNC since 1983.  During that time, he has taught courses in introductory economics, international economics, development economics and macroeconomics both to undergraduates and to graduate students.  He has also served as Chair of the Department of Economics, Diversity Coordinator in Economics and as Academic Director of the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship.  He served as a Faculty Mentor for the American Economic Association (AEA) Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics between 2008 and 2012.

His research has focused upon the international aspects of trade and finance with emerging economies.  He is the author of three books and many refereed journal articles.  His current research interests include the impact of IMF lending programs on emerging-economy welfare, the development of financial markets in transition economies, the welfare impact of exchange-rate depreciation in developing countries, and the dynamic adjustment of import-competing industries to international competition.

He served in the Peace Corps in Cote d’Ivoire in 1975-77, and as a special assistant to the US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs in 1980-81.  He has served as an international and macroeconomic expert on World Bank missions to Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Belarus, and has twice been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund.  He was named a Council on Foreign Relations fellow in 1989 for his work on the implications of the debt crisis for developing countries.  He has worked more recently with the UN Conference on Trade and Development to analyze the impact of trade barriers on emerging-economy welfare.

He was awarded the UNC Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence and the William C. Friday Award for Excellence in Teaching at UNC and has been inducted into the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Frank Porter Graham Honor Society.  He received a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs from Harvard University for his innovative use of cases in instruction.  He has facilitated pedagogical sessions for economists at the AEA annual meeting on four occasions and was a faculty trainer in the Teaching Innovations Program sponsored by the AEA Committee on Economic Education.  He was the founding director of the Center for Faculty Excellence on the UNC Chapel Hill campus and received the Kenneth Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award from the Southern Economic Association.

He attended Georgetown University in Washington, DC as an undergraduate, and received his BSFS degree in 1975.  After the Peace Corps he did graduate work at Princeton University, receiving an MPA degree in 1979 and a PhD in Economics in 1984.

His work on poverty in North Carolina began during his year as a Global Research Institute Fellow in 2011.  He has written a number of papers on the incidence of poverty in North Carolina, using county-level information over time to identify the potential causes of high-poverty counties.  He has been on the board of advisors of the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity since its inception.

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