STAFF INFORMATION

Robert "Tino" Sonora, Associate Director/Director of Health Care Research / Senior Research Professor

Phone: 406-243-5113

Fax: 406-243-2086

Email: robert.sonora at business.umt.edu

Tino Sonora joins the BBER as Associate Director and Director of Health Research after over 20 years in academia. Prior to coming to the University of Montana he was a Professor of Economics at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a Visiting Scholar of Economics at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and a two time Fulbright recipient. At Fort Lewis he was also Director of the Office of Business and Economic Research. He has guest lectured at the Universities of Guadalajara (Mexico), Zagreb, Rijeka, Pula, Osijek, Zadar (Croatia), Alpen-Adria (Austria), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Loyola-Andalucia (Spain) and the Institute of Public Finance in Croatia.

In addition to Health, his current research interests are: Economic growth, income inequality, transition economics and international finance and trade. He holds a BA in economics from Connecticut College, a MA in international Economics from the University of Essex in the UK and a MA and PhD in Economics from The Ohio State University.

Select publications

“Price Level Convergence Among United States Cities”, International Economic Review, 43(4), 2002, 1081 – 1099 (with Stephen G. Cecchetti and Nelson C. Mark)

“CPI Convergence Between Mexican Cities”, Review of Development Economics, 9(3), 2005, 359 -- 367

“Testing the PPP Hypothesis and Idiosyncrasies in Transition Economies Using Panel Structural Break Unit Root Tests”, Czech Journal of Economics and Finance, 60(3), 2010, 213 – 225 (with Josip Tica)

“Public Debt and Economic Growth Conundrum: Nonlinearity and Intertemporal Relationship”, Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, 22(1), 2018 (with V. Arcabic, J. Lee, and J. Tica)

“Cointegration of Electricity Consumption and GDP in the Presence of Smooth Structural Changes”, Energy Economics, 97, 2021 (with V. Arcabic, T. Gelo, and J. Simurina)

“A Panel Analysis of Income Inequality and Energy Use”, forthcoming, Contemporary Economic Policy, 2021.