Award Recipient– Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

Esther Lee

Esther Hee Lee is a Ph. D candidate from South Korea and will be on the job market this year. Her desire to pursue a career in teaching and research led her to UC Irvine which has an excellent program in (applied) econometrics. Esther is on the job market this year looking for a position where she can continue her research in theoretical and applied econometrics and international macroeconomics.

Currently she is refining the last chapter of her dissertation, “The Analysis of Correlated Counts”which gives a general way of handling a multivariate regression of count data with a copula approach. Esther’s dissertation also includes a theoretical econometrics paper on simulated likelihood estimation and this paper has been presented at Yonsei University conference in South Korea. Her joint work with Ivan Jeliazkov extends “MCMC Perspectives on Simulation Likelihood Estimation” and is forthcoming in Advances in Econometrics: Maximum Simulated Likelihood, 26 in 2010. She also wrote an international macroeconomics paper on examining the fluctuations of land and stock prices in the Japanese economy. This paper was published in The Korean Journal of Economics 16 (1) in 2009.

Among her many accomplishments, Esther has received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Economics for the 2008 school year. In addition to teaching, she has been fortunate to receive several research fellowships from the Department of Economics.

In her spare time, Esther plays the piano, violin, and recorder, though never at the same time. She also has served as a wedding singer for her colleagues.