Top Economists Come to Yale for Cowles Summer Conferences
This year's series of conferences featured a brand new addition to the conference marathon while hosting over 350 economists from universities around the world.
Over five days in June, Yale scholars welcomed 350 of the world’s leading economists to Evans Hall for the 2026 Cowles Summer Conferences, a series of two-day conferences on specialized topics within the field.
In addition to longstanding programs on labor and public economics, models and measurement, economic theory, international trade, econometrics, and macroeconomics, this year’s conference debuted a new program on political economy. Yale SOM became a co-host of the series in 2025, and faculty from the school worked with colleagues across the university to organize many of the conferences.
“The papers spanned a wide range—pricing, energy, housing, insurance, bargaining, and some more methodological work on demand and identification,” said Kevin Williams, a professor of economics at SOM, who organized the Conference on Models and Measurement alongside Adam Kapor of Princeton University. “What stood out wasn’t any single theme but the quality of all of the work. The discussants were excellent, which makes a real difference.”
The Cowles Summer Conferences began as intimate gatherings of economists in the 1930s and soon gained prominence: the 50th anniversary conference in 1983 was attended by 16 current or future Nobel Laureates. To reinvigorate the conference in 2007, organizers overhauled the structure, creating the overlapping series of two-day programs that quickly became popular and persists today.
This year’s event featured an address from Nobel Laureate Damon Acemoglu, who introduced a new theory on the rise of cultural politics. Panelists also discussed topics related to artificial intelligence throughout the week, presenting research on reinforcement learning, behavioral prediction, and the stability of the financial market under AI stock pickers.
Alongside Cowles Foundation staff, organizing scholars begin planning months in advance by soliciting papers from their respective fields and then selecting discussants for each accepted paper.
Faculty say that the resulting discussions provide unique enrichment for their work.
“Cowles brings together researchers who are otherwise scattered across many universities,” Williams said. “Having everyone in one room for two days, with discussants who've read the papers closely, leads to the kind of detailed conversation that's hard to get any other way.”