ACTIVITIES THIS WEEK
Interdisciplinary Events 2021-2023
Conferences / Workshops
Roundtables
Highlights from our events
Virtual Roundtable – Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Inequality. Economic and Political Challenges of an Aging Population, 10 November 2023. The workshop organized by CIREQ on November 10th, 2023, focused on the multifaceted challenges posed by aging populations. Gustavo Ventura and Kevin Munger, experts in economics and political science, respectively, led the discussions. The panel explored the economic and political ramifications of demographic shifts, emphasizing the sustainability of pension systems and broader socio-economic impacts.
Interdisciplinary CIREQ-CDACI Workshop in Economics and Law: Competition and Telecommunications in Canada, 25 October 2023. This multidisciplinary workshop in law and in economics gathered more than 60 students, researchers and professionals interested in competition in the Canadian telecommunications industry. The first presentations offered an analysis of the recent acquisition of Shaw by Rogers. They compared this transaction with other examples of mergers between mobile network operators recently approved or blocked elsewhere in the world. These analyses also shed light on some limitations of the Competition Act and the merger review process in Canada. Modifications aiming at alleviating these shortcomings have been discussed. The following presentations summarized econometric studies of the competition between mobile telecommunication firms at three levels: spectrum auctions, investment in networks and plans offered to consumers. Finally, to draw more connections between academic research and practice, the last presentation of the workshop described the role played by the Competition Bureau during recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearings related to the state of competition in this industry.
CIREQ Macroeconomics Conference: Innovation and the Future of the Labor Market, 6 October 2023. Technological change has been shaping the future of work in profound ways. Recent technologies not only transform industries but also redefine the nature of employment. In this evolving landscape, it is important to understand the interaction between technological change and the labor market more than ever. This conference has combined recent studies on the causes and the consequences of technological change, with a special focus on its relation to the labor market.
CIREQ Microeconomic Theory Conference: Advances in Economic Theory, 30 September 2023. Economic theory has been rapidly advancing in a number of directions in recent years. From developing a framework to compare human and algorithmic agents, to obtaining a sharper characterization of the role played by information in economic interactions, the range is broad, and the topics are important. The conference brought together junior researchers working at the research frontier. The day began with a means to compare two sources of information from an agent’s perspective who may possess a third source that is correlated with the first two. A characterization of how much private information a buyer would want a seller to possess followed. The next session featured exciting new work on model misspecification, as well as a new look at the classical Coase conjecture through a reputational model of bargaining. Post lunch we learned about the implications of agents interacting across multiple games followed by a comparison of human and algorithmic evaluators. The final session started with a careful study of the use of quotas in mechanism design problems and ended with a characterization of the remarkable power of the agenda setter in the legislature.
CIREQ Applied Economics Conference: Issues in Labour and Urban Economics, 8-9 September 2023. We are extremely happy that Enrico Moretti accepted our invitation to give the keynote lecture in the CIREQ Applied Economics Conference. Enrico is the Michael R. Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at Berkeley. His research career has been broad and prolific, touching most areas of labor economics. Enrico’s early work deepened our understanding of human capital externalities, leading organically to three areas of his research, that of agglomeration economies, peer effects, and place-based policies. Alongside his groundbreaking work on externalities, Enrico Moretti has also written papers in diverse topics such as party vs voter preference in determining the roll-call votes of elected representatives, the intergenerational transmission of human capital, the impact of compulsory education on political participation and crime, the consequences of pollution for health, the role of children’s gender in household formation, among many other topics. He has received several awards including the Carlos Alberto Award, the prestigious Rosen Prize from the Society of Labor Economists as well as the William Bowen Prize for his book “The Geography of New Jobs”.
Together with Enrico Moretti’s fascinating keynote lecture on the role of city size in determining labor market outcomes, the conference was composed of a fantastic line up of speakers. In the first day, Fernand Rojas Ampuero (Center for International Affairs, Harvard University) discussed and presented the long run negative effects on children of displacing lower income families from slums into social housing. Her research showed how these displacements led to worse outcomes such as education and employment that persisted well into adult life of the children. In the same day, Heather Sarsons (Vancouver School of Economics, UBC) analyzed how taking into account consumer preferences for fairness in goods production can reconcile different contradictory findings of the effect of minimum wages on labor markets. In the second day, we were pleased to have Winne van Dijk (Yale University) who highlighted how a right to counsel law for tenants in New York led to unintended large increases in rents. Also in the second day, Lorenzo Lagos (Brown University) analyzed the important question of making the workplace more gender balanced with better amenities such as childcare facilities. His findings point to the important role of unions in achieving these goals.
The conference was finished by an exquisite lunch prepared by the staff at ITHQ.
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