The Economics Department is pleased to welcome Assistant Professors Guy Numa and Niroj Bhattarai, as well as our first post-doctoral researcher, Diksha Arora, to the Economics Department!

Originally from France, Assistant Professor Guy Numa earned his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in Economics from the Université Paris Dauphine from 2003-2009. Numa specializes in History of Economic Thought, Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, Industrial Organization, and Caribbean Political Economy. When asked about his teaching philosophy, Numa replied, “Teaching has enabled me to share my passion for research and my passion for sharing knowledge. As an instructor, I strive to help my students become better citizens. I want them to understand the world they are living in, so they can make better decisions for themselves.”

Prior to CSU, Numa was an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and an Arthur Sachs Research Scholar at Harvard University. Numa also served as Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and Assistant Professor at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (France). Previous appointments include teaching positions at Barnard College, the New School, and Université Paris Dauphine (France).

Numa’s work has appeared in leading journals such as The Journal of Economic Perspectives, History of Political Economy, The Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and The European Journal for the History of Economic Thought. Numa is the author of a book on the regulation of the railroad industry published by Éditions Classiques Garnier. Professor Numa also co-authored two books on the 2009 social movements in the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

 

Assistant Professor Niroj Bhattarai received his undergraduate degree from Hiram College in Ohio, Masters from San Diego State University, and his Ph.D. from Colorado State University. He returns to CSU after a decade at the Colorado Community College System serving in various capacities including as the Department Chair of Social and Behavioral Sciences at FRCC. Most recently, as the project manager, he successfully established a P.O.S.T. certified Police Academy at FRCC in collaboration with multiple Law Enforcement Agencies in Northern Colorado.

His research is primarily in the field of education and its role in development. Bhattarai and his students, in partnership with Rotary, built gender-specific toilets in a village in Nepal, where they were able to document increases in both enrollment and attendance, particularly for girls. His recent research, along with Drs. Anita Alves Pena and Alexandra Bernasek, focuses on factors affecting school attendance in rural and urban Nepal, where they discovered that menstruation, and lack of facilities, played a major role in girls’ attendance and experience in school.

Bhattarai will also be serving as the department’s new Online Coordinator. Bhattarai describes his pedagogical approach to teaching as embracing a collaborative learning design that puts high value on access and success. “Having been a teacher for over a decade, I am acutely aware of the diverse student body that we serve. I believe it is important for educators to develop their courses with a focus on access—universal design for online courses, for example— and, adjust their pedagogy to help students from all backgrounds so that they can not only achieve all of the course competencies and learning outcomes, but excel in them.”

In the Fall 2019 semester Numa is teaching one section of History of Economic Thought. Bhattarai is teaching one section of Intermediate Macroeconomics and one section of Economic Development.

 

Post-doctoral researcher Diksha Arora earned her PhD from the University of Utah in 2016. In her doctoral thesis, “Gendered poverty in peasant households: Case study of rural Mozambique,” she constructed a gendered computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that integrates the role of social norms in intra-household decision-making and the impact of time-poverty on labor productivity.

Prior to joining CSU, she worked as a Gender PostDoc Fellow from 2016-2018 and Gender Economist from 2018-2019 at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia. Her work at CIAT focused on examining the impact of climatic shocks on gender roles in agricultural production and unpaid care work; and assessing women’s empowerment in livestock sector. She also worked with the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program of CGIAR to assess gender-based constraints to adoption of climate-smart practices by smallholders. The geographical focus of her research is in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. She has field experience in Mozambique, Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala. At CIAT, she also worked with policymakers at local and national levels to promote uptake of gender considerations in their development policies. Her work has been published in economics and development journals such as Feminist Economics, Agricultural Economics and Review of Social Economy.

At CSU, she will be working on the issues of incorporating care work in the macroeconomy, theoretical approaches to consider time-use effects of climate-change induced shocks and examining the role of intra-household dynamics in adoption of climate-smart agricultural technology and natural resource management programs.