Summer Workshop in Economic Theory

Since 1984, the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University has hosted a series of summer workshops on selected topics in economics and management. The topics have varied from year to year and have included: strategic models of competition, game theory, industrial organization, bounded rationality and complexity, capital theory, monetary economics, microfoundations of macroeconomics, learning, and political economy. Each of the workshops is fairly narrowly focused on an area of current reassert, bringing together researchers working directly in the fields of emphasis. Each is organized around a program of formal seminars with a schedule that is sufficiently flexible to leave ample time for informal discussion and interaction. Each workshop is a week long so that participants would be in attendance for the entire conference. This grant provides funding for conferences to be held at Northwestern University during the summers of 1999. Each conference consists of two week-long workshops, one concentrating on theoretical issues in macroeconomics and the other on microeconomics. Areas that look promising for the 1999 macroeconomics workshop include: macroeconomic consequences of contracting frictions; searching and matching models of labor market dynamics; and models of financial 'fragility.' Areas that look promising for the 1999 microeconomics workshop include: rational and social learning, market structure and information transmission, models of bounded rationality, and mechanism design approaches to the theory of the firm.