Cowles Foundation Hosts 15th Annual Summer Conferences
The Yale Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics hosted the 15th annual series of Summer Conferences in 2022, welcoming 300+ participants to Yale’s campus.
The Cowles summer conferences are designed to advance the Cowles Foundation’s goal of developing and applying rigorous logical, mathematical, and statistical methods of analysis in economics. This year’s conference featured over 60 presentations, with many accompanying discussions to help shape the research and give rise to new work. The week included six individual 1-2 day conferences, each with its own theme and roster of top academics in the field. Below are highlights from each of the conference organizers.
The 2022 Cowles Labor and Public Economics Conference brought together 60+ researchers to discuss 8 papers covering a broad set of issues ranging from the origins of the US opioid epidemic, to the development of new tools to measure the tolerance of political regimes, to the role of inheritances in the determination of wealth inequality. The papers included several which touched on the dimensions of race: one studied how different racial groups in the US have been affected by changes in international trade over the past two decades, while another discussed the interplay between GPA restrictions on the major choice of US college students, and a trend for under-represented minority college students to (increasingly) choose relatively less lucrative fields of study. The conference also featured work on the extraordinary fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on the impact of expanded unemployment benefits on labor markets and household spending.
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/labor-public/2022
The 2022 Cowles Economic Theory Conference brought together 70+ researchers to interact and discuss 12 papers covering topics such as novel approaches to mechanism/information design, foundations of belief elicitation, information provision in markets and political settings, manipulability of voting schemes, firm coalitions and market structures, robust tools for welfare analysis, and organizational culture. This year's organizer, Ryota Iijima, invited a diverse set of researchers from the US and abroad. Professor Iijima said of the conference “We wanted this year’s program to feature a broad range of topics in microeconomic theory, ranging from methodological foundations to the design of real-life institutions."
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/economic-theory/2022
The 2022 Cowles Models and Measurement Conference brought together 80+ researchers to workshop and discuss 10 papers covering topics such as collusion among generic prescription drug makers, the role of firm buyer power in distorting technology adoption, and the design of defined contribution plans. This year, Organizers Charles Hodgson, Chris Neilson, and Katja Seim invited a broad group of researchers focused on the use of model-based estimation in applied microeconomics, in hopes of promoting spillovers across a variety of empirical research areas.
The Organizers notes that they "really wanted this year’s conference to showcase the broad applicability of model-based estimation in fields ranging from the Economics of Education to Environmental Economics and Industrial Organization.” One particularly interesting thread throughout the work was the effort made at measuring the effectiveness of public policy in each of these areas which highlights the practical relevance of research in this space in informing and improving policy. Research highlights from the conference also included two methodological contributions that developed tools for improved estimation of demand models, a building block for most applied work in this space.
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/industrial-organization/2022
The 2022 Cowles International Trade Conference brought together 60+ researchers to present and discuss 11 papers. This year, Organizers Laura Alfaro and Diana Van Patten brought together researchers focused on the general theme of international trade, foreign investment, and technology diffusion.
Professors Alfaro and Van Patten sincerely thank speakers for their great presentations and discussants who did a formidable job throughout the conference. The organizers are also grateful to the Cowles Foundation, with a special thanks to Marina Halac for her effort in organizing the conference and Darlene Smith for her continuous assistance.
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/international-trade/2022
The 2022 Cowles Macroeconomics Conference brought together 30+ researchers to discuss 10 frontier papers covering important topics such as the stabilization roles of fiscal and monetary policy, the sustainability of government debt, the transmission channels of monetary policy, the interaction between macroprudential and monetary policies, the international spillovers of monetary policy, and optimal exchange rate policy.
This year, organizers Alp Simsek and Ludwig Straub brought together a group of researchers focused on macroeconomic stabilization policy in a post-pandemic era. Professor Simsek noted: “Motivated by the aggressive use of stabilization policies in the Covid-19 recession, and the remarkable recovery that followed, we wanted to understand the effectiveness and the optimal design of various macroeconomic stabilization policies. We got a lot out of the discussions on the sustainability of government debt, the transmission of monetary policy to long-term interest rates and exchange rates, and the optimal design of exchange rate policy. Going forward, we would love to see more research on the relative stabilization roles of fiscal and monetary policy. We also liked that the conference was relatively small and featured researchers with related interests, which stimulated many comments and fruitful interactions.”
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/macroeconomics/2022
The 2022 Cowles Econometrics Conference features speakers who are just a few years out from their Ph.D. The motivation for gathering this group was that this cohort had not had the usual opportunities to present their work in-person and network with others due to the impact of covid. The speakers were Karun Adusumilli (University of Pennsylvania); Eric Auerbach (Northwestern University); Anna Bykhovskaya (Duke University); Harold Chiang (University of Wisconsin); Wayne Gao (University of Pennsylvania); Louise Laage (Georgetown University); Xinwei Ma (UCSD); Mikkel Solvsten (University of Wisconsin); Jann Speiss (Stanford GSB); Max Tabord-Meehan (University of Chicago); Chen Qiu (Cornell University); and Andrei Zeleneev (UCL).
The papers covered a wide variety of topics: multiway empirical likelihood, testing with many restrictions under heteroskedasticity, treatment effect estimation with estimation of compliance, identification of average marginal effects in fixed effect logit models, maximum score-type estimation of models with single or multi-indices, estimation in panels with interactive fixed effects with a low rank structure, randomization inference methods for cluster-randomized experiments, matrix extensions of quantile treatment effects in networks, panels, and scenarios, treatment allocation rules when the welfare criterion is nonlinear, partial identification of demand under attention overload, minimax stopping rule in dynamic experiments, and cointegration with many time series. Many attendees noted the very high quality of the presentations and the research papers presented.
The full conference agenda and list of papers is available here: https://cowles.yale.edu/conferences/econometrics/2022