Dr. Mussa earned her Ph.D as well as her Master’s degree in Applied Economics from Western Michigan University in 2011. She received her bachelor’s degree in Applied Economics from Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She joined Farmingdale State College Department of Economics in Fall 2011. Dr. Mussa also served as a junior researcher at Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute (EEPRA) before moving to the United States. She has taught a variety of macroeconomics and finance-related economics courses since her arrival at FSC. Currently, she is teaching Money and Banking, Financial Economics, and Principles of Macroeconomics. Over the last five years, she has been teaching the first part of the capstone course, Economic Research and Reporting, in the Applied Economics program, in which each student is required to analyze a selected research question using real data. She has also been actively serving in various committees in the department, the school, as well as in the campus at large.


Dr. Mussa is largely interested in conducting research in the area of immigration, housing markets, real estate, and asset pricing. She published her research in various peer-reviewed academic journals and presented in numerous conferences. For example, she recently published a paper, co-authored with Dr. Garrison Song, entitled “Commercial Real Estate Market with Two-sided Random Search: Theory and Implications” in the Journal of Property Research. In this paper, a two-sided random search model is set up to study the trading behaviors between buyers and sellers in the commercial real estate market. Against the traditional view, the existence of the market search friction always plays a negative role in the commercial real estate market. The paper finds that under some regime, the existence of the market search friction can increase the market equilibrium transaction price of the commercial property and thus benefit sellers, which is considered the most valuable especially during the downturn of the business cycle. 


In addition, she is interested in conducting research in the area of financial behavior and financial literacy. In collaboration with her colleagues, Dr. Xu Zhang and Dr. Meeghan Rogers, currently she is conducting research that explores how technology affects financial behavior. The first part of this research was presented at New York State Economic Association annual conference in November 2020. To expand this research and explore the unique financial behavior of FSC students (of which the majority are commuters), a survey questionnaire is prepared and it will be administered during spring 2021.