Plenary
Lectures
There will be four plenary
lectures during the conference, delivered by the four following
distinguished speakers:
Richard Blundell
is the Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at
University College London and is also Research Director of the Institute for
Fiscal Studies. He is a graduate of the University of Bristol and London
School of Economics. Since 1986 he has been Research Director of the IFS,
where he is also Director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis
of Public Policy. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the University of
St.Gallen, Switzerland in 2003. He has held visiting professor positions at
UBC, MIT and Berkeley. In 1995 he was awarded the Yrjö Jahnsson Prize for
his work in microeconometrics, labour supply and consumer behaviour, and the
Econometric Society Frisch Medal in 2000, for his paper Estimating Labour
Supply Responses using Tax Reforms, published in Econometrica, July 1998. He
was President of the European Economics Association in 2004 and President of
the Econometric Society in 2006. He is currently President of the Society of
Labor Economists). He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1991), Fellow
of the British Academy (1996), Honorary Member of the American Economic
Association (2001), Honorary Member American Academy of Arts and Science
(2002), Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (2003) and Fellow of
the Society of Labor Economists (2005). He was co-editor of Econometrica
from 1997-2001 and co-editor of the Journal of Econometrics from 1992 to
1997.
Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics at
University College London, Director of the Centre for the Economics of
Education and a Programme Director (of the Skills and Education research
programme) at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of
Economics. He is currently one of the Editors of the Economic Journal.
Previously he has been visiting Professor at Harvard University (1993/4) and
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001/2). He is a member of the
Low Pay Commission in the UK. He is President of the European Association of
Labor Economists.
Robert Shimer
is the Alvin H. Baum
Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. He
received his B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1990, his M. Phil. in
economics from Oxford University in 1992, and his Ph.D. in economics from
MIT in 1996. Shimer began his academic career at Princeton University and
joined the economics faculty at the University of Chicago in 2003. Shimer
was a visiting professor at MIT. He is also a consultant to the Federal
Reserve Bank of Chicago, and is currently editor of the Journal of Political
Economy. Shimer's research looks at the topics of labor markets and
macroeconomics. He has mainly focused on search frictions, but more recently
become interested in the mismatch between workers' human capital and
geographic location and the skill requirements and location of available
jobs.
John Van Reenen has established an
international reputation as a scholar of the economics of consequences and
causes of innovation. He works on the applied econometrics of industrial
organization and labor economics, especially areas relating to productivity
growth, management and organizational practices, R&D, anti-trust,
intellectual property, policy evaluation and investment decisions. John Van
Reenen has been a full Professor of Economics at the London School of
Economics, and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance since 2003.
He graduated with a First from Cambridge University (Queens� College) with
the highest mark in a decade before completing a Masters degree (with
distinction) from the LSE, and doing his PhD at University College London in
1993. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, and a Professor at University College London. He has also been an
editor of many journals, including the Journal of Economic Literature,
Journal of Industrial Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. He has
served as a senior advisor to the UK Prime Minister, Secretary of State for
Health, and the European Commission. Formerly, he was a partner in an
economic consultancy company, Lexecon, and Chief Technology Officer in a
software start-up. He frequently appears in newspapers, radio, and TV.
