Keynote Speakers

Robert Shimer

Robert Shimer is the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago.  He is editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.  His research explores the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics, focusing on search frictions and on the mismatch between workers’ human capital and geographic location and the skill requirements and location of available jobs.  His best-known publications include "Efficient Unemployment Insurance" (Journal of Political Economy, 1999), "Assortative Matching and Search" (Econometrica, 2000), "The Cyclical Behavior of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies" (American Economic Review, 2005), and "Mismatch" (American Economic Review, 2007).

 Lee E. Ohanian

Lee E. Ohanian is Professor of Economics, and the Director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA. He is an advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and previously has advised other Federal Reserve Banks, Foreign Central Banks, and the National Science Foundation. He is an expert in the area of economic crises, and his research has been published widely in a number of peer-reviewed journals. He currently serves on the editorial boards of 3 journals, including Econometrica. He previously served on the faculties of the Universities of Minnesota and Pennsylvania. He is a frequent media
commentator on international and macroeconomics, with columns in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes, and others.

 Brian Copeland

Brian Copeland is Professor and Head of the Economics Department at University of British Columbia, Vancouver.  His primary areas of interest are international trade and environmental economics  He has worked extensively with M Scott Taylor and their works include "Trade and the Environment: Theory and Evidence" (Princeton University Press 2003), and "Trade, tragedy and the commons" (American Economic Review 2009).  In 2004 he was a recipient of the Doug Purvis Memorial Award in Canadian Economics.

Brian is an editor of the Journal of International Economics and his previous editorial service includes Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Canadian Journal of Economics.

 Orley Ashenfelter

Orley's areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. He is the director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University, and has been director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He is a recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Society of Labor Economists, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Scienes, the Society of Labor Economics, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He edited the Handbook of Labor Economics and is currently co-editor of the American Law and Economics Review and a previous editor of the American Economic Review. His current research includes the evaluation of the effect of schooling on earnings, the cross-country measurement of wage rates, and many other issues related to the economics of labor markets.

 Deborah Cobb-Clark

Deborah Cobb-Clark is a Professor of Economics in the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU and is co-editor of the Journal of Population Economics.  She earned a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan (1990) and has held previous positions at the US Labor Department and Illinois State University. Professor Cobb-Clark is the founding director of The Social Policy Evaluation, Analysis and Research (SPEAR) Centre and has been Associate Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU.  Her research agenda centres on the effect of social policy on labour market outcomes and she has published more than four dozen academic articles on immigration, sexual and racial harassment, health, old-age support, and youth outcomes in journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and Labour Economics.

 Edward Lazear

Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hoover Institution.  He is a labor economist who is a founder of a field known as personnel economics.

His research centers on employee incentives, promotions, compensation, and productivity in firms.  From 2006 to 2009 he served at the Whitehouse as Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.  Founding Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a former President of the Society of Labor Economists.  He has over 100 published articles and eleven books.

Lorraine Dearden

Lorraine Dearden is a Professor of Economics at the Institute of Education, University of London, Director of the new ESRC funded centre: ADMIN – Administrative Data: Methods Inference and Networks.  She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Economics of Education. Her research focuses on the impact of education and training on labour market outcomes and company performance; evaluation of education and labour market policies; impact of month of birth on childhood and adult outcomes; income support for students; the evaluation of childcare, home learning environment and early years policies on children's and parents' outcomes; ethnic inequality and discrimination; the determinants of the demand for different types of schooling; wage determination and the labour market; higher education funding issues; and intergenerational income and education mobility. Lorraine is an Australian and did her undergraduate Economics study at the Australian National University but has been based in the UK since 1992.

 Lin Zhou

Professor Lin Zhou is the WP Carey Professor of Economics at Arizona State University. After obtaining his doctoral degree in economics from Princeton University in 1989, Professor Zhou has taught at Yale University, Duke University and the City University of Hong Kong. He has been a visitor to many institutions around the world, including Monash University. He is also currently the Dean of the School of Economics of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Dr. Lin Zhou is an expert in microeconomics theory, game theory, and social choice theory. He has published in many top economics journals, including Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior.

He has made several important contributions on the following subjects: (1) voting by committee; (2) mechanism design in economic environments; (3) the bargaining set in cooperative game theory; (4) game theory and revealed preference theory; (5) the existence of competitive equilibrium in the presence of increasing return technologies. Dr Zhou is very proud of being a co-author with Dr. Xiaokai Yang and Dr. Guangzhen Sun on the last project.