9:45 a.m., Nov. 21, 2008----The University of Delaware Department of Economics recognized its 50th completed Ph.D. in its 13-year history when Jim Markham defended his thesis, "CEO Entrenchment Versus Boards of Directors: Performance is Not All that Matters to Turnover," on Oct. 24.

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Markham examined the determinants of board of directors' decisions to retain or replace CEOs. He found that these decisions depended critically on how the directors and the CEO respectively control company stock. Greater CEO control reduces CEO turnover, while greater control among directors other than the CEO increases it.

William Latham, professor of economics, and Helen Bowers, professor of finance, were co-chairs of Markham's thesis.

The first economics Ph.D. at the University of Delaware was awarded in 1995 to Tevfik Aksoy, a Turkish native who is now the chief economist for Africa and the Middle East for Morgan Stanley (Turkey). He resides in Istanbul.

The 25th Ph.D., awarded in 2003, was to Christine Saliba, who works in the transfer pricing division of PriceWaterHouseCooper in Washington, D.C. Saliba was a product of the department's joint degree program with the University of Lyon II.

Markham, the 50th recipient, is a Wilmington native who returned to graduate school after having worked in the insurance industry for 15 years. In addition to his research work, Markham was also an outstanding instructor in introductory macroeconomics.

Other graduates of the Ph.D. program are scattered in teaching, government, and industry. Ash Morgan, who earned a doctorate in 2002, is now teaching at Appalachian State. Other teaching positions of economics graduates include Penn State, East Carolina University, Villanova, West Chester, Howard, and universities in Canada, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

Andrew Hill (2003) works in the community affairs department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Matt Martin (1997) is a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Other graduates work at EPA, NOAA, Social Security Administration, Census Bureau, the Delaware Department of Labor, World Bank, IMF and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

In industry, Kate Harback (2005) is a senior economist for MITRE-2, an airline transportation consulting firm, and Khalid Bekka (1998) is vice president, HDR|HLB Decision Economics, Inc., a transportation consulting firm in Silver Spring, Md. UD graduates also work at Ernst & Young, Global Insight, and Entrix Environmental Consulting.

Program graduates have several other distinctions. Six doctorates were jointly awarded by the University of Delaware and the University of Lyon II in Lyon, France. UD is the only American university to have such a joint degree in economics with a French university.

Another three graduates were Bulgarians, the product of the department's five-year USAID-funded economic education project in Bulgaria in the mid-1990s; one more Bulgarian student will complete a dissertation this year.

In 2006 and again in 2008, economics department Ph.D. students were chosen by the National Science Foundation to attend the Conference of Nobel Prize Laureates in Lindau, Switzerland.

Christine Saliba and Kate Harback both won the Ryden Prize for the best UD dissertation in the Social Sciences, and current graduate student Stela Stefanova was awarded the University of Delaware Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching assistants in May.