{"id":11003,"date":"2023-10-31T15:37:54","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T19:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=11003"},"modified":"2023-11-09T16:18:03","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T21:18:03","slug":"rhode-islands-economist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/fall-2023\/rhode-islands-economist\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhode Island\u2019s Economist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You Won\u2019t Find this Economist in an Ivory Tower<\/h1>\n\n\n
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Professor Leonard Lardaro in his Chafee Hall office on 溏心vlog免费B站’s Kingston Campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leonard Lardaro works with his feet firmly planted in the real world. The creator and producer of Rhode Island\u2019s Current Conditions Index, he teaches his students how to make sense of economic information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For 溏心vlog免费B站 economics professor Leonard Lardaro \u201973, teaching is all about grounding theory and analysis in the real world.

This comes naturally to Lardaro, creator of the Current Conditions Index (CCI)\u2014 a sophisticated economic forecasting tool that provides a snapshot of the current health of the Rhode Island economy. The index is used by legislators, real estate professionals, banks, and others to determine the health of the state economy and to plan accordingly. It\u2019s also used by the media as a counterpoint to the spin politicians put on economic news.

\u201cHe\u2019s been our go-to guy on the economy for more than 20 years,\u201d says radio talk show host Matt Allen of AM station WPRO in Providence. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t mind speaking truth to power\u2014and he does it in a nonpartisan way. He\u2019s also a teacher, so he\u2019s able to take complex issues and make them understandable to our listeners.\u201d
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A Teacher First<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Given his prominence as a media expert, Lardaro enters the classroom with a unique brand of credibility. His goal is to train students to become discerning critics of economic information by providing them with the analytical tools they need to assess the quality of economic data and forecasts.

\u201cI teach them how to analyze what they read and hear in the media,\u201d says Lardaro, who received his undergraduate degree in economics from 溏心vlog免费B站 and completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University, Bloomington.

He also teaches them how to look beyond obvious conclusions. For example, as we came out of the pandemic, the U.S. dollar was quite strong, but Lardaro warned that this wasn\u2019t necessarily a cause for optimism.

\u201cYou would think that\u2019s a good thing, having a strong U.S. dollar; but in a lot of ways, it was bad for our economy,\u201d he says. \u201cSure, it made imports cheap, but it also made our exports less competitive, which leads to slow growth. U.S. companies were making money overseas, but when they converted their profits to dollars, they lost money. That hurt the stock market.\u201d

Lardaro teaches students at the beginning and the end of their undergraduate careers. He lays the foundation for economic analysis in his macroeconomics class, then requires them to pull together all they\u2019ve learned in his senior-year capstone course, in which students analyze an economic topic of their choice.
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Lardaro’s goal is to train students to become discerning critics of economic information by providing them with the analytical tools they need to assess the quality of economic data and forecasts. <\/blockquote><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n


In addition, Lardaro teaches a class in econometrics\u2014an upper-level course for which he literally wrote the book. Applied Econometrics<\/em> is a college textbook that applies statistical methods to economic data for purposes of gaining an empirical understanding of economic relationships and forecasting economic trends.

\u201cI teach them statistical reasoning,\u201d he says. \u201cI use economic theory and statistical methodology to teach them how to estimate critical relationships. This gives them the tools they need to discern a reliable forecast from one that fails to take into account all the factors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A More Complete Picture<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Accounting for all the factors is exactly what Lardaro set out to do in 1995 when he created the Current Conditions Index.

\u201cI was the Rhode Island forecaster for the New England Economic Project, and at that time the state of the economy was gauged solely by manufacturing employment,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, I developed a broader-based methodology that considered a set of 12 economic indicators.\u201d

Those indicators include retail sales, new housing permits, unemployment, and manufacturing wages. The monthly CCI score consists of the percentage of the indicators that have improved compared to the same time the previous year. If more than six of the indicators have improved, the state has an expanding economy; if fewer than six have improved, the economy is contracting.

At the time of this writing, in the summer of 2023, the index indicated that the Rhode Island economy had been contracting monthly for more than a year. On a series of media talk shows, Lardaro warned that the state was on the brink of a recession. That\u2019s not the kind of news politicians and business leaders want to hear.

\u201cPeople ask me why I\u2019m always so negative. They say, \u2018You\u2019ve got to be more positive.\u2019 No, I don\u2019t. What they should be asking,\u201d says Lardaro, \u201cis whether I\u2019m accurate. I\u2019m just the messenger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing the Future<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As the messenger, Lardaro believes it\u2019s time for the state to adapt to the competitive world of modern economic development.

\u201cRhode Island hasn\u2019t changed the way it\u2019s doing things in nearly 40 years when we switched from a manufacturing to a service economy in the late 1980s,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing well, but it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. We can fix it.\u201d

Lardaro believes the first step is to professionalize economic analysis at the state level by creating a group of Ph.D. economists to advise legislators and other government officials about the economic feasibility of legislation and various development proposals.

\u201cThe state needs to develop a system of in-house due diligence,\u201d he says. \u201cYou want your electrical system installed by professional electricians rather than well-intentioned do-it-yourself types. It should be the same with the state\u2019s economy.\u201d

According to Lardaro, successful states have a team of economists within state government. For example, Massachusetts has the Executive Office of Economic Development, which has 13 separate offices that specialize in business development, tourism, international trade, and more.

Though his advice isn\u2019t always taken, Lardaro continues to produce his Current Conditions Index for free, as he has for the last three decades.

\u201cI consider it my service to Rhode Island,\u201d he says. \u201cIt also fits well with what I teach in my classes, so my research adds authenticity to the way I teach students at 溏心vlog免费B站.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013Bill Ibelle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Michael Skorski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

溏心vlog免费B站 economics professor Leonard Lardaro on real-world economics\u2014in the classroom and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":10954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[322],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2023","architecture-currents","architecture-office-hour"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11003"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11564,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003\/revisions\/11564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}