July 27–28, 2012
Combining advanced computational technologies with modern economic theories of social and economic interactions could help produce far more realistic models of important economic problems. Yet too few economists are prepared to apply these tools.
To address this, the Initiative for Computational Economics (ICE) organized this two-day conference to bring together leading scholars in this innovative field. Experts in mathematics, computer science, economics, econometrics, finance, and related fields will explore approaches that can shed light on economic issues.
This conference is a culmination of an intensive two-week summer program that strengthens the computational skills of students and young economists. ICE—a collaboration of the Becker Friedman Institute, the Computational Institute, and the Economics Research Center—has presented the student summer program since 2005. This year for the first time, the Institute is hosting this conference in conjunction with the summer program to expose participants to the best state-of-the-art computational methods and allow students and faculty to interact and gain from these exchanges.
Learn more about ICE at http://ice.uchicago.edu.
Sponsors
- Becker Friedman Institute
- RDCEP Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy
Program
Friday, July 27
| 9–10 am | “The Polynomial First-Order Approach to Principal-Agent Problems” Karl Schmedders (University of Zurich) |
| 10–10:30 am | Break |
| 10:30–11:30 am | “Analyzing Fiscal Policies in a Heterogeneous-Agent Overlapping-Generations Economy” Shinichi Nishiyama (Georgia State University and Congressional Budget Office) Paper (.pdf) » |
| 11:30–12:30 pm | “Extended Mathematical Programming: Competition and Stochasticity” Michael Ferris (University of Wisconsin Madison) Paper (.pdf) » |
| 12:30–1:30 pm | Lunch |
| 1:30–2:30 pm | “Nonlinear Adventures at the Zero Lower Bound” Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania) Paper (.pdf) » |
| 2:30–3 pm | Break |
| 3–4 pm | “Computational Abstraction: Strategies for Scaling Up Applications” Douglas Thain (University of Notre Dame) |
| 4–5 pm | “CIM-EARTH and the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate Energy Policy” Ian Foster (University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory) |
Saturday, July 28
| 9–10 am | “High-Dimensional Sparse Econometric Models, an Introduction” Alexandre Belloni (Duke University) |
| 10:15–11:15 am | “The Dynamics of Bertrand Price Competition with Cost-Reducing Investments” John Rust (University of Maryland) |
| 11:15–12 pm | “Use Manifolds, Not Functions” Kenneth Judd (Hoover Institution) |
| 12 pm | Lunch |