Conference Presentation Opportunities

Students at the dissertation writing stage are urged to try to present their work at external conferences prior to going on the job market. Presenting at external conferences helps spread the word about your research, gives you the opportunity to get feedback about your work, helps you make professional connections, and perhaps most importantly gives you practice in presenting your work in a clear and professional manner, a skill that is extremely important on the job market.

Some of the most prestigious and well-attended conferences in the profession include the Summer Institute and other conferences run by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); the North American and other worldwide meetings of the Econometric Society; the Minnesota Workshop on Macroeconomic Theory; and the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. It is difficult for a graduate student to get on the program of some of these high-level conferences (especially the NBER conferences); others are more open to graduate students.

Fortunately, there are also a large number of lower-tier conferences where our students have an easier time getting on the program, and that still provide valuable opportunities for networking, feedback and professional development. Below I list some conferences at which our graduate students have presented recently. Your thesis advisors may know of other possibilities. Most of these conferences meet on a periodic schedule, and you can learn more about upcoming meetings, submission guidelines and deadlines by going to their websites.

In recent years, a small but growing number of summer workshops have been offered to graduate students in areas such as computational economics and applied econometrics. These workshops give students at earlier stages of development the chance to acquire valuable tools for their research. I list some examples of workshops recently attended by our students below; your advisors may know of other opportunities.

The department is happy to support student travel expenses for students to attend workshops and present at conferences. For more information about department support, click here.

Some Recent Conference Presentations By Our Graduate Students

European Economic Association Annual Meetings/Econometric Society European Meetings, August 2008, Milan.
NBER Summer Institute, Development of the American Economy Workshop (Economic History), July 2008, Cambridge MA.
International Association of Energy Economics International Conference, June 2008, Istanbul.
La Pietra-Mondaragone Workshop in Economics, June/July 2008, Florence.
International Economic Association's World Congress (International Trade and Finance), June 2008, Istanbul.
Canadian Economics Association Annual Conference, June 2008, Vancouver.
International Society of New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) Conference, June 2008, Toronto.
Spring 2008 Midwest Economic Theory and International Economics Meetings, May 2008, University of Illinois.
Society of Labor Economists Conference, May 2008, New York.
Midwest Economics Association Annual Meetings, March 2008, Chicago.
International Conference on Industrial Organization, January 2008, Arlington VA.
American Economic Association Annual Meetings, January 2008, New Orleans.
Latin American Meetings of the Econometric Society, October 2007, Bogota.
International Conference on Panel Data, July 2007, Xiamen University (China).
First World Conference of the Spatial Econometrics Association, July 2007, Cambridge UK.
Western Economic Association Annual Conference, June/July 2007, Seattle.
Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Conference, November 2006, Madison WI.
Southern Economic Association Annual Conference, November 2006, Charleston SC.
Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) Conference, November 2006, Mexico City.
Colorado University Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop, September 2006, Vail CO.
Recent Workshops Attended By Our Graduate Students
A Course in Applied Econometrics, August 2008, University of Wisconsin
2008 Institute on Computational Economics, July 2008, University of Chicago.
Spatial Econometrics Advanced Institute, May/June 2008, Rome.
European School for New Institutional Economics (ESNIE), May 2008, Corsica.