News
Economics students place first and second in two Federal Reserve contests and bring home notice from Alan Greenspan
Archived article from Dec 6, 2004
By Patricia Lamiell
Months of hard work paid off Nov. 30 for nine Rutgers undergraduate students. They were runners up in the Federal Reserve Board’s College Fed Challenge in Washington, D.C., losing by only one point, 39-38, to Northwestern University of Chicago. The pain was softened, however, when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had some high praise for Rutgers.
In remarks before the competition, Greenspan joked that the Rutgers team might be getting unofficial coaching from a prior Federal Reserve chairman, the late Arthur F. Burns, who taught economics at Rutgers. Greenspan also noted that Burns’ star pupil at Rutgers was the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
“He warned all the contestants to expect a strong competitor in Rutgers,” recalled Jeffrey Rubin, an economics professor who had coached the students. The students delivered, Rubin said. “It was a very, very high level of competition, and the final result could easily have been in our favor.”
Rutgers reached the inter-district competition by winning the New York Federal Reserve’s regional Fed Challenge Nov. 10., topping 19 other teams. The Rutgers presenters were economics majors Mark Klee and Puneet Sondhi; James J. Williamson, a pre-business major; and first-year students, Ravi Bharadwaj, and Alan Gu. Students Alton Worthington, Michael Zarrella, Priya Tandon and Kingkit Cheung assisted in development and research.
In the College Fed Challenge, teams of students analyze current economic data and offer an opinion on interest rate policy. Their presentations are judged by a panel of Fed economists. The contest was created to promote greater understanding of how the Fed develops and implements monetary policy. This year, Rutgers, Northwestern and Lafayette College, located in Easton, Penn., competed in the first ever inter-district contest.
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