November 22, 2005
The fourth annual Advances in Econometrics conference was held October
28-30, 2005, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
The conference was jointly sponsored by the Departments of Economics at
Louisiana State University, and Southern Methodist University, as well
as the Division
of Economic Development and Forecasting at LSU, and Dedman College at SMU.
The conference featured econometricians from China, England, Sweden, Switzerland,
and the United States. The purpose of the conference is to bring together
authors of papers, a small and highly regarded collection of scholars,
for discussion,
debate, and feedback.
Papers presented at the conference represented a sample of those to be
published in the next volume of the Advances in Econometrics series, entitled “Modeling
and Evaluating Treatment Effects in Econometrics.”
The series is set to be published by Elsevier Science in 2006.
The economics and statistics literature on treatment effects has grown
enormously over the past few decades, with much of the economics research
pioneered
by recent Nobel laureate James Heckman.
The primary focus of the literature is on evaluating the impact of a
policy intervention or program on an outcome of interest.
For example, one might be interested in evaluating the effect of a particular
job training program on an individual’s earnings, or of a teacher
accountability policy on student test scores. The difficulty arises
when the program or policy
is not conducted like a clinical trial, where the treatment and control
groups are not randomly formulated.
Instead, the researcher must infer the effect of the program from “observational
data,” where subjects “self-select” into either the treatment
or the control group. Given that the majority of data available to economists
is “observational,” econometric methods for modeling
and evaluating treatment effects in this situation are extremely
important for understanding
the economy and deriving policy recommendations.
Professors Carter Hill of LSU and Thomas Fomby of SMU are the senior
editors of the Advances in Econometrics series.
The guest co-editors of the upcoming volume are Daniel Millimet
of SMU, Jeffrey Smith of the University of Michigan, and Ed Vytlacil
of Columbia
University.
For more information on the conference, contact Hill at 225-578-1490,
or visit http://www.bus.lsu.edu/economics/.
