The Sixth ICEF International Conference on Applied Economics
On October 25-26, 2024 ICEF held the Sixth ICEF International Conference on Applied Economics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The conference was held in the format of live discussions with the participation of researchers from leading Russian and foreign universities, which contributed to the exchange of ideas and the development of international cooperation.
Scholars in the field presented their latest research and provided extensive comments on each other’s work. Among our invited speakers were such scholars as Sergio Jara Diaz (Universidad de Chile), Shihe Fu (Wuhan University), Alexander Tarasov (FES, HSE University), Olga Rozanova (RANEPA and ICEF, HSE University), Davide Cianciaruso (NES), Guochang Zhao (SWUFE), Anna Yurko (ICEF, HSE University), Wei Xiao (SWUFE). Researchers actively contributed as speakers and discussants. Such collaborative format produced significant benefits, provided valuable insights and highlighted areas in which authors could have pursued a more productive path in their studies.
The organizing committee of the conference consisted of Prof. Fabian Slonimczyk (chair, ICEF, HSE University), Prof. Maxim Nikitin (ICEF, HSE University), Prof. Markus Gebauer (ICEF, HSE University), Andrei Dementiev (HSE University).
Prof. Fabian Slonimczyk, ICEF HSE University, chair of the conference organizing committee
- How did the idea of ICEF Conference on Applied Economics come about? What kind of studies does it focus on? What kind of researchers does the conference attract?
We first came up with the idea to have a conference on applied economics in 2017. It was ICEF’s 20th anniversary and we thought that the best way to celebrate it would be to create a brand new event that would expand on the resounding success of ICEF’s yearly international finance conference. The idea for the conference on applied economics was to gather a small group of internationally recognized researchers to present their research in a workshop format. This means that, unlike large conferences where there are several parallel sessions and presenters are given 20 minutes or less, we offer a venue where we dedicate a full hour to each paper. Moreover, each presentation gets a discussant who reads the paper and makes a presentation of their own with many observations and suggestions. It is also very important that everyone is present throughout the event. The end result is that, by the end of the day, a group of people that started off not knowing each other very well is now well acquainted with each other’s current projects.
- How wide is this year’s geography of the participants?
Over the years, researchers from literally all over the world have visited us in Moscow for the conference. This year, we had three distinguished colleagues from some of the best Chinese universities, as well as a very famous expert in transportation economics from Chile.
- Can you tell more about the speakers and the topics they were speaking on? Are there updates in the programme design, how does the 6th Conference stand apart from all previous ones?
This year’s program was exceptional for several reasons. For the first time, we expanded the conference to a two-day format. The first day was dedicated to a workshop with papers on transportation and urban economics. This part of the program was put together by my colleague Andrei Dementiev. I am not an expert on this field and I must say that I found all presentations extremely interesting. One common thread of all the presentations is the very important attempt to introduce time and transportation costs into economic models, and then use the insights gained to analyze data. For example, Prof. Jara-Diaz’s paper looks at how commuting and other forms of committed time change the conclusions in a standard labor supply model. He then uses the model to gain insight into "time use" data from Chile. Another great example is Prof. Shihe Fu’s paper, where he studies the effect of transportation costs on consumption patterns of people living on different parts of a metropolitan area –some more central, some more suburban— using data from a payment service provider.
During the second day we held the main event, which included papers from very different fields. Our colleague from NES, Davide Cianciaruso, presented a remarkable paper. He and his coauthors document very surprising negative effects of the introduction of a mandatory survey among exiting patients at US hospitals. They have very solid evidence that the introduction of the survey, which might seem innocuous at first, actually incentivized hospital management to divert resources from life-saving services to marketing and other customer-friendly services. The result was a sizeable increase in mortality. I was very excited to present my new paper, in which I use large language models to extract sentiment scores from academic letters of recommendation. I then show that the contents of the letters has a very significant impact on job market outcomes. We closed the workshop with a presentation via zoom from Shanghai! Prof. Wei Xiao presented a remarkable piece of research, where he pursues a multiplicity of strategies to pin down the effect of city enlargements in China, which has a been a very important tool to foster development there.
Andrei Dementiev, HSE University, member of the conference organizing committee
The main result of the first day was the very fact that various methodological approaches fueled the debate on optimal time and space allocation of economic resources. The idea to apply economics to urban and transportation studies has attracted many scientists from different disciplines in the last two decades. This field of research has been traditionally dominated by civil engineers, but nowadays is largely influenced by theoretical and applied economists.
Apparently, the international landscape of this research agenda is largely shaped by the International Transportation Economics Association (ITEA). We invited prof. Jara-Diaz who used to serve as a chair of its executive committee. Importantly, the current chair of ITEA scientific committee, prof. Jan Brueckner, co-authored Wei Xiao in their joint paper on government-directed urban growth presented in the second day of the conference.
In the first day of the special workshop prof. Jara-Diaz and prof. Shihe Fu presented the updated versions of their papers from the last Summer ITEA conference. Another paper with the first results of the study on mixed delivery models in public transport by A. Dementiev and O. Rozanova’s was also presented at the previous ITEA conference. These three streams of transportation research were complemented by A. Tarasov’s paper on spatial competition with commuting customers, which provided yet another insight how transportation affects pricing strategies of asymmetric chains.
