F
The Department's newest faculty member is Esen Onur. Esen is from Turkey and he was raised in Istanbul. He attended Union College in Schenectady, NY, briefly - and then completed his B.S. in physics from Koc University in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before joining the Economics Department at CSUS, he taught classes at the University of Virginia, College of William & Mary and most recently at the University of California, at Davis.
The areas of specializations for his degree were: macroeconomics, financial economics and econometrics, but his main research field is in the microstructure approach to international finance. Microstructure is a finance-based approach that has recently been incorporated to international finance. It focuses on the day-to-day trading aspect of currency markets rather than the long-run analysis. In a recent paper, he showed how informational differences between these day-to-day currency traders can account for some of the volatility in current markets. His study is forthcoming in the International Journal of Finance and Economics and he is currently working on identifying and measuring this informational difference.
Esen is also interested in traditional and online betting markets. Along with another researcher, Levent Celik, from CERGEI-El in Prague, they are investigating the inefficiencies and inconsistencies in these markets. Since betting markets are structured just like the financial markets, it allows them to compare their findings with the existing literature.
Esen has other interests outside of economics, he is very interested in soccer. He and his twin brother Ilke, (who is also an economist), are working on creating a new competitiveness measure designed specifically for soccer leagues around the world. Esen had the following to say about himself: I am happily married with two daughters. The younger of my daughters was born two weeks ago and she has brought us many sleepless nights. I have two brothers, one, my twin - and my older brother who lives in New York - and is struggling to keep his job at Wall Street nowadays.
Esen encourages students to come and visit him during his office hours if they would like to talk about Economics (or soccer!).