Georgeanne Artz
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Agricultural Economics, Iowa State University, 2005
M.S., Resource Economics and Policy, University of Maine, 1999
B.A., Economics, Yale University, 1996
Georgeanne Artz received this year's Outstanding Service in Student Recruitment and Retention Award given by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She also won the Impacting Iowans Award from Iowa State University Extension in 2014.
While studying for her Ph.D. at Iowa State, she worked as an extension program specialist, working for Roger Ginder on agribusiness issues and Ken Stone on retail trade and rural development issues. She accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor in 2010, and became an assistant professor of economics in 2013.
Artz has been an academic adviser for the Agricultural Business Club for three years. Under her guidance, the club has continued its string of outstanding club awards. She also coaches teams to prepare for academic quiz bowls and fosters undergraduate research that has led to award-winning submissions. Artz is also the coach for the Quiz Bowl Team.
Quiz Bowl is a jeopardy-like game, with a category board consisting of the following categories: microeconomics, macroeconomics, agribusiness and finance, resources and policy, quantitative, management, marketing and potpourri. Artz recruits students for the team, selects students to travel to competitions, helps organize travel and travels with the team.
"I organize the practices, which involves writing questions for the rounds and there is an element of teaching involved in terms of helping students understand how to answers the questions."
"We currently participate in the Southern Ag Econ Meetings and the AAEA summer meetings. We have also started sending students to the NACTA agribusiness management competition — this year in Crookston, Minnesota."
"The bulk of my scholarly efforts focus on investigating issues relevant to business and economic development in rural America. This work falls into two broad categories. One set of projects is focused on understanding firm- and farm-level decisions. This research utilizes economic choice models to frame and analyze business owners’ decisions, and the salient factors affecting those decisions. It incorporates new institutional economic theories, including the role of transaction costs, and theories of collective action where relevant, for example, in my work on the formation, benefits and challenges of machinery sharing and of employee-owned cooperative firms. The second broad category pertains to understanding the business climate in which these firms operate. This research uses regional economic models and econometric approaches such as difference-in-differences, to systematically assess impacts of changes in rural communities. A third area of my scholars effort is in the area of education and human capital which plays into issues of both the above areas. This work draws on human capital theory and sorting models to better understand the impact of college curriculum choices on future earnings of alumni and is geared to generating practical knowledge that can directly inform curriculum decisions in our department and in similar departments at our peer institutions."