Monday, June 9, 2008

CEA meetings

I have been at the Canadian Economic Association meetings and an associated conference sponsored by the Canadian Labor and Skills Research Network (CLSRN) in Vancouver.

Among the intellectual highlights for me was the CLSRN talk by Robert Moffitt on trends in inequality, the "state of the art" lecture by Randy Wright on integrating search models of the labor market with search models of money demand and the SRDC (MDRC's Canadian offspring) session on the CEIP program evaluation, which my UWO student Shek-Wai "Taylor" Hui had a hand in.

I missed David Card's state of the art lecture on labor economics as something I ate kept me in my hotel room on Friday. I am told by multiple sources that he mentioned my work with Shannon Seitz (Boston College) and Jeremy Lise (UCL) on the general equilibrium evaluation of the Canadian SSP program, which is nice. I also missed Caroline Hoxby's lunchtime lecture as the lunch was sold out by the time I registered for the CEAs, even though I registered fairly early on.

Among the personal and culinary highlights was dinner at Chambar with various Canadian labor economists. Craig Riddell picked the restaurant and the wine, which is always auspicious.

Vancouver fact: most Vancouver taxis are Priuses (or is it Priii?)