A Primer on the Fed
Hoyt Bleakley
Tue Jan 15, 02:30-04:00pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
Prereq: none
The how's and why's of Federal Reserve policy, including a tour of recent policy debates (from the perspective of an MIT and Fed "alumnus").
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Emissions Trading: Hype or Harbinger?
Denny Ellerman
Fri Feb 1, 02-03:30pm, E51-376
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Emissions trading has gone from being a pariah among policy-makers to being a star...everyone's favorite way to deal with pollution problems. This session will provide an explanation of emissions trading, a taxonomy of the types of emissions trading now being considered, and an assessment of the experience with emissions trading, mostly in the United States. The aim of the session is to provide attendees with an ability to distinguish the hype from the harbingers of the future for environmental regulation.
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Globalization and the Economic Downturn
Lester Thurow
Fri Jan 11, 11am-12:30pm, E51-345
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Globalization is for the first time being hit by a global economic hard landing. What happens to globalization in the process? What should one expect to see when it comes to a recovery? How do companies and national economies have to change their management styles in hard times?
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Guns and Crime
Mark Duggan
Mon Jan 28, 03-04:30pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
The causal effect of gun ownership on the crime rate is a controversial issue. This lecture will discuss the results from recent empirical research that has investigated this effect. Implications for public policy will be discussed.
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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How to Use DATASTREAM
Francesco Franco
Tue Jan 29, 10-11:30am, Undergrad Lab in E52
Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Signup by: 28-Jan-2002
Limited to 8 participants.
Datastream services cover two key areas; first is historical content, much of it unrivalled in breadth and depth, on securities, companies, markets and economies globally. And alongside that content is a range of delivery platforms, offering easy-to-use, focused and flexible tools to analyze, manipulate and display the data. This talk will concentrate on its use for the economist (as opposed to the financial operator). Included will be A) What is datastream B) How to find the data C) How to download the data D) Special functions of datastream: graphs and descriptive statistics
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Industrial Strength Auctions
Paul Milgrom
Tue Jan 22, 01-03:00pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
The last five years has seen an explosion of new ideas for auctioning complex assets, with academic ideas influencing multi-billion dollar spectrum sales, business procurement, electricity markets, and more. This talk will review the performance of some of the new auction designs, emphasizing the most exciting recent developments.
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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The Kyoto Emissions Targets for Greenhouse Gases and Improvements on Them
Richard Eckaus
Wed Jan 9, 02-03:30pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
A substantial portion of the difficulties in reaching agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions have their sources in differences among countries the desired distribution of the burdens of emissions constraints. The emissions constraints agreed on at Kyoto are quite arbitrary, both in terms of environmental science and economics. Calculations are presented of the implications of alternative allocations of emissions reductions that do have a plausible ethical basis: equal per capita emissions rights, equal country shares in reductions, equalized welfare costs, and emulation of the allocations of the United Nations budget. All of these would reach the overall Kyoto target at lower overall costs. This conclusion is another example of the well-known result that the overall cost of reducing emissions would be lowered through the participation of the developing countries, in which the costs of emissions reductions are relatively low. In addition, use of any of the alternative allocations analyzed here would eliminate the wholly capricious accommodation given to the countries of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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The World Economy
Olivier Blanchard, Ricardo Caballero, Roberto Rigobon
Wed Jan 23, 05-06:30pm, E51-345
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
A discussion as to where the world economy appears to be going, and the potential implications of September 11.
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Universal Laws in Economics: Doing Economics with Statistical Physics Methods
Xavier Gabaix
Thu Jan 24, 04-06:00pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Economic data display a series of robust relationships that seem to hold across different times and economic systems. They are sometimes called "universal relationships". For instance, the distribution of firms, cities, mutual funds and even internet sites seem to follow "Zipf's law." Zipf's law says that the size of firms (resp. city, mutual fund etc) of the n-th largest city is proportional to 1/n. Similarly robust patterns have been found in he scaling of stock market fluctuations, trading activity, firm and GDP growth dynamics. This talk will survey the evidence and proposed explanations for those regularities. They typically have a "statistical physics" flavor.
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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Water: Crisis, Conflict, and Rational Thinking
Frank Fisher
Mon Jan 7, 01-02:30pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
It is often said that the next war will be about water, but rational thinking shows that this is not true. An optimizing model has been built for Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, leading to a powerful method for the cost-benefit analysis of infrastructure and, more significantly, to a valuation of water ownership and a method of win-win conflict resolution.
Web: http://econ-www.mit.edu
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
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