2020 AEA Continuing Education Webcasts

January 5-7, 2020, Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, San Diego, CA

The AEA's 2020 Continuing Education Program was held at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter on January 5-7, 2020, immediately following the close of ASSA. Participants chose from three concurrent programs.

Mastering Mostly Harmless Econometrics (Alberto Abadie, Joshua Angrist, and Christopher Walters)

Metrics Handouts

Webcasts:
View Part 1| View Part 2 | View Part 3 | View Part 4 | View Part 5 | View Part 6 | View Part 7 | View Part 8

Alberto Abadie | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alberto Abadie is an econometrician and empirical microeconomist, with broad disciplinary interests that span economics, political science and statistics. Professor Abadie received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1999. Upon graduating, he joined the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was promoted to full professor in 2005. He returned to MIT in 2016, where he is Professor of Economics and Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). His research areas are econometrics, statistics, causal inference, and program evaluation. Professor Abadie’s methodological research focuses on statistical methods to estimate causal effects and, in particular, the effects of public policies, such as labor market, education, and health policy interventions. He is Associate Editor of Econometrica and AER: Insights, and has previously served as Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Joshua Angrist | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joshua Angrist is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, a director of MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, he taught at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before coming to MIT in 1996. Angrist received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1982 and completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton in 1989. Angrist's research interests include the economics of education and school reform; social programs and the labor market; the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions; and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation. Angrist is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has served on many editorial boards and as a Co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Gallen (Switzerland) in 2007 and is the author (with Steve Pischke) of Mostly Harmless Economics: An Empiricist's Companion and Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect, both published by Princeton University Press. Angrist and Pischke hope to bring undergraduate econometrics instruction out of the Stones Age.

Christopher Walters | University of California-Berkeley
Christopher Walters joined the economics department as an assistant professor after receiving his PhD in economics from MIT in 2013. He received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2012. In 2008, he graduated with a BA in economics and philosophy from the University of Virginia and received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His research focuses on labor economics and the economics of education, with an emphasis on school performance at the primary and early childhood levels. This work includes quasi-experimental studies of the effects of charter schools on test scores and post-secondary outcomes, a study documenting and explaining variation in effectiveness across Head Start childcare centers, and an analysis of differences in the demand for school quality across demographic groups. His work also involves developing and applying econometric tools to answer questions of practical interest.  

Monetary Policy (Gauti B. Eggertsson, Jon Steinsson)

Download Slides | Reading List | Eggertsson, "Fundamental Driven Liquidity Traps"

Webcasts:
View Part 1 | View Part 2 | View Part 3 | View Part 4 | View Part 5 | View Part 6 | View Part 7 | View Part 8 | View Part 9

Gauti B. Eggertsson | Brown University
Gauti B. Eggertsson is a macroeconomist and a Professor of Economics at Brown University Economics Department. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2004, after having completed his B.S. in economics from the University of Iceland. He has worked at Research Departments of the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Since graduation he has also been visiting faculty at Princeton, Yale,  and Columbia where he taught international finance and macroeconomics at both graduate and undergraduate level .  Eggertsson has published in a variety of professional journals such as the American Economic Review, Brooking Papers on Economics Activity, Economic Journal, Journal of Monetary Economics,  Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Review of Economic Dynamics and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The main focus of his work is the analysis of monetary and fiscal policy over the business cycle, both from a modern and historical perspective. 

Jon Steinsson | University of California-Berkeley
Jon Steinsson joined the department in 2018 as Chancellor's Professor of Economics. He received a bachelor‘s degree in economics from Princeton University in 2000 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007. Jon taught at Columbia University from 2008 to 2018 before moving to Berkeley. He is Co-Director for the Monetary Economics program of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His main area of research is empirical macroeconomics. His work has focused on characterizing price rigidity and its macroeconomic consequences, identifying the effects of monetary and fiscal policies, and understanding the effects of forward guidance on the economy among other things. He grew up in Iceland and participates actively in the political and economic discourse in that country.

Climate Change Economics (Lint Barrage, Michael Greenstone, Gilbert E. Metcalf)

Download Slides | Reading List

Webcasts:
View Part 1 | View Part 2 | View Part 3 | View Part 4 | View Part 5 | View Part 6 | View Part 7 | View Part 8 | View Part 9

Lint Barrage | University of California-Santa Barbara
Lint Barrage is an Assistant Professor of Economics at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University, and holds a BA in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Chicago. Before joining UCSB in 2019, Barrage was a faculty member at Brown University, at the University of Maryland, and a visitor at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Her research lies at the intersection of macro-public and environmental economics, with a special focus on climatic risks and integrated assessment modeling. For example, Barrage has worked on incorporating fiscal considerations into climate-economy models, on eliciting and accounting for heterogeneous beliefs about climatic risks in housing market models, and generally seeks to integrate new data and empirical findings into structural environment-macroeconomy frameworks. She is also a research affiliate at CESifo, AURÖ, and RIPL.

Michael Greenstone | University of Chicago
Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor in the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Department of Economics, and the College, the Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), and Director of the Becker Friedman Institute (BFI). His research largely focuses on environmental and energy economics. Friedman was on the University of Chicago faculty from 2000 to 2003, and he rejoined the faculty in 2014. Prior to rejoining the University faculty, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Economics at MIT. Among Greenstone's many honors, he is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Faculty Director of the E2e Project; Director of the Climate Change, Environment, and Natural Resources Research Programme of the International Growth Centre; a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution; and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gilbert E. Metcalf | Tufts University
Syllabus
Gilbert E. Metcalf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Professor of Economics at Tufts University. In addition, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a University Fellow at Resources For The Future. Metcalf's primary research area is applied public finance with particular interests in taxation, energy, and environmental economics. His current research focuses on policy evaluation and design in the area of energy and climate change. He has frequently testified before Congress, served on expert panels for the National Academies of Sciences and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and served as a consultant to numerous other organizations. During 2011 and 2012, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he was the founding U.S. Board Member for the UN based Green Climate Fund. He has published extensively in academic journals and books on various topics including energy and tax policy. Metcalf received a B.A. in Mathematics from Amherst College, an M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.