Research Advances at the 2025 Cowles Summer Conferences
To be invited to present a research paper at the Cowles Summer Conferences is no small thing. Each year, organizers pour over hundreds of submissions from their five respective fields to find the most cutting-edge scholarship. The 2025 Cowles Summer Conferences at Yale SOM were no exception.
Research advances can come from the introduction of new methodologies, or techniques of investigation. Sometimes new data, or the novel combination of datasets, allows researchers to answer questions they didn't have sufficient information on in the past. And sometimes, it's the application of methodologies or data collection to previously unexplored topics that spark new learnings. At the Labor and Economics Conference, for example, organizers noted that researchers are compiling new, larger datasets which allow for better quality investigations, such as combining datasets to present a more accurate picture of deep poverty in the United States.
The International Trade conference also benefitted from new data, as well as applications to new questions beyond the traditional boundaries of international trade. Given the recent attention to global tariffs, understanding the broader impacts of trade policies and how firms make decisions under such conditions will represent important advancements in the field. The Macroeconomics conference similarly had recent events to study, like post-pandemic inflation patterns.
The congregation of researchers at the Cowles Summer Conferences is about more than just the papers. Conference organizers pointed out that the gathering is key for fostering interactions and sparking ideas for new research. They described the conversations both during and in-between presentations as active and insightful.
See below for more takeaways from the organizers of each of the five Cowles Summer Conferences.
Organizers
“There’s growing attention to international trade policy due to rising geo-political tensions and isolationist policies. Combining theory and data, the papers studied the effects of a wide range of trade policies on a rich set of economic outcomes. The policies covered included export restrictions, tariff exclusions, industrial policies on strategic inputs as well as the more standard tariffs. The outcomes studied ranged from stock market returns to markups, food security, directed technical change, and production decisions of multinationals. Progress was also made in the modelling of supply chain networks and firms’ sourcing decisions under uncertainty.
Overall, what struck us was the expansion of topics beyond the traditional trade policies and patterns of specialization, and the use of novel datasets to shed light on these topics.”
Organizers
“For this conference we tried to include a diverse set of papers from across Industrial Organization (IO) and related fields. As well as core IO topics such as market power, we also included papers applying structural models to questions about taxation of firearms, the internal structure of firms, and the role of brokers in housing markets, as well as more methodological papers about testing for collusion and improving techniques for demand estimation. The breadth of papers reflects the recent growth in "IO plus" research that draws from the structural econometrics tradition that is associated with the Cowles Foundation.”
Organizers
“The biggest way that the field is progressing is in the quality of the underlying data. Some of the most important papers presented at the conference were notable not principally for innovating methodologically, but for doing a tremendous amount of hard work to construct a dataset that didn't previously exist. An example of this is the work that Derek Wu presented, combining a very large number of previously separate administrative datasets to develop better measures of poverty.
A standard complaint about modern economics is that we've sacrificed ‘big questions’ in pursuit of answerable questions. I think many of the papers presented deal with questions that are both big and answerable — the sweet spot! For example, Yunan Ji's work on the impact of Medicare price cuts on medical device innovation. The question of how Medicare prices impact innovation is very first order, and Yunan's paper also provides very persuasive causal evidence on this question.”
Organizers
This year's Cowles Conference brought together participants on a range of topics in short-run macroeconomics, spanning empirical, theoretical, and quantitative approaches. These included frontier papers studying how firms' pricing decisions respond to monetary shocks, (“Micro and Macro Cost-Price Dynamics in Normal Times and During Inflation Surges” and “Business Cycles with Pricing Cascades”) and empirical and theoretical analyses of how fiscal stimulus and the financing of fiscal policy affect the economy (“Ricardian Non-Equivalence” and "Deficits and Inflation: HANK Meets FTPL").
These topics really complemented each other in helping to build our understanding of the post-pandemic inflationary episode as well as helping us think about how monetary and fiscal policy can react to future episodes. Following in this policy-relevant vein, we also heard about how the fed can optimally integrate financial conditions targeting into its policy framework (“Financial Conditions Targeting”).
We also learned about very interesting theoretical research on wage determination and its implications for labor market dynamics (“The Macroeconomics of Wage Rigidity and Job Separations”) and how the staggered timing of invoicing and payment can lead to large-scale production disruptions (“A Theory of Payments-Chain Crises”).
Finally, we heard about cutting-edge numerical techniques to handle the solution of models with aggregate shocks and heterogeneity across agents (“Global Nonlinear Solutions in the Sequence Space and the Generalized Transition Function”), which will surely serve as a basis for further study of a range of policy-relevant topics. The high quality of the papers was complemented by equally thoughtful and insightful discussions.
Organizers
“The Cowles Conference was successful in bringing together theorists to the East Coast, for talks covering a wide range of topics, and active friendly discussions.”