News Archive: 2011

November 9, 2011
David Card to give GU Razin Policy Lecture on April 17, 2012.

GCER is pleased to announce that David Card, the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, will present the 2012 Razin Policy Lecture at Georgetown University.

This year’s Razin Lecture is entitled “Social Interactions” and takes place on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 4:00 pm in the BSB 490 Fisher Colloquium.

Professor Card was honored by the American Economic Association in 1995 with the John Bates Clark Medal. More he received the Frisch Medal in 2007 for the outstanding research paper (with D. Hyslop) published in Econometrica in 2005, and the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2006, from Germany’s Institute for the Study of Labor, the leading award for labor economists. David Card’s research spans a wide range of issues and problems in labor economics. He research topics include the effect of minimum wage, the impacts of immigration, the consequences of racial segregation, and the effects policy changes on health insurance utilization and on health. Card’s most recent work studies peer effects and inequality in the workplace.

Sep 10, 2011
John Rust to join GCER and GU Econ Faculty.

The Georgetown Department of Economics is very pleased to announce that John Rust will be joining the department in the Fall of 2012 as Professor. Rust will be moving over to Georgetown from the University of Maryland where he has resided as Professor of Economics since 2001.

Rust’s research is internationally renowned, and spans both the technical frontier and the practical side of economics. He is best known for his research on the development of computationally tractable methods for solving and estimating models of dynamic decision making under uncertainty.In a series of widely acclaimed publications Rust demonstrated that these discrete dynamic programming models provide accurate predictions of actual human decision making in a variety of contexts. Along the way, he pioneered new algorithms for solving these problems, attracting the attention of leading computer scientists and mathematicians working in the field of computational complexity as well as the economists working in this field.

Rust has received numerous awards for his research. He was awarded an Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 1988 and a fellowship at the Hoover Institution in Stanford in 1991. He was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1993 and became a fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute (the largest retirement fund for college professors) in 2003. In 1997, Rust received the Ragnar Frisch Medal from The Econometric Society for his first empirical application of the method in the paper, “Optimal Replacement of GMC Bus Engines: An Empirical Model of Harold Zurcher.”

Rust has been on the editorial board of numerous journals including serving as an Associate Editor at Econometrica and co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Social Security Administration and a member of the Long Term Modeling Advisory Panel at the Congressional Budget Office. He has served as a member of the Economics Panel of the National Science Foundation and the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academy of Science, as a member of the Panel on Retirement Income Modeling, and served as an advisor to the Steering Committee that advised on the design of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS).

Most recently Rust has served as a member of the Technical Advisory Panel to the Social Security Advisory Board, and a consultant to the Social Security Administration on long term policy modeling via a research contract between SSA and the Urban Institute.

Rust received his PhD from MIT in 1983, specializing in applied econometrics. He held previous faculty positions, first at the University of Wisconsin from 1983 to 1995, and then at Yale from 1996 to 2001. In all his faculty appointments, he has been Professor of Economics since 1990.

Aug 15, 2011
GU Faculty Welcome Pedro Carneiro as newest Faculty member.

Georgetown Department of Economics welcomes its newest member, Pedro Carneiro who now joins the Department in the Fall of 2011. Carneiro arrives from University College London where he currently holds the rank of Reader, and will hold the rank of Associate Professor at Georgetown.

Carneiro comes to GCER with an outstanding record of scholarship and expertise in the areas of labor economics and applied microeconometrics. His research focuses on human capital development, that is, the ways in which individuals acquire the skills that determine their earnings potential. These include early childhood development, education, and on-the-job training.

Carneiro has much-cited publications in Econometrica and The American Economic Review among other highly respected outlets. His work figured prominently in a number of areas. One paper, in particular, that has received much attention was co-written with James Heckman and concerns heterogeneous treatment effects. A policy designed to increase college attendance, for example, can have a strong effect on some parts of the target population but weak (or even negative) effects on other parts of that population. For many purposes, it is important to be able to estimate the distribution of treatment effects. Carneiro and Heckman use a “latent factors” approach to estimate the heterogeneous treatment effects, and this approach is now considered to be a major methodological innovation in the field.

Carneiro received his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2003. After completing his PhD, he joined the faculty of University College London.

Mar 27, 2011
Esther Duflo to Speak on “Poor Economics” at Georgetown in April.

Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT and one of the leading experts in the field of program evaluation will speak about her new book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty on April 26.

The Lecture, Reception, and Book Signing takes place on Tuesday, April 26, 12 noon – 2:00 p.m. in the Rafik B. Hariri Building (Business School).

Mar 26, 2011
ECB Board Member Defends the Euro in Georgetown Economics Conference.

In a panel hosted by GU Economics Professor Matthew Canzoneri, European Central Bank Executive Board member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo defended the Euro at a recent conference on Spanish economy held at Georgetown University.

The event was picked up by many in the financial press, including Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.

Mar 5, 2011
Tenth Carroll Round Schedule Announced.

The Carroll Round, the only undergraduate conference for International Economics, is hosted annually at Georgetown University and will be held Thursday, April 14 through Sunday, April 17 this year. The conference provides top undergraduate students from around the world the unique opportunity to present and discuss their research with other students, professors, and policy-makers. This year’s featured speakers are Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati. For further information about the conference, please visit: Carroll Round.