Workshop in Economic Theory

9514981 Jones This grant renews support for the Northwestern Summer Workshop Series. It supports conferences at Northwestern University during the summers of 1996, 1997, and 1998. Each consists of two week-long workshops, one concentrating on theoretical issues in macroeconomics and the other on microeconomics. The topics for the three years will vary. Areas that look promising for the 1996 macroeconomics workshop include: fertility and population growth, institutions for dealing with income and employment risk, and theoretical and computational methods for studying models with heterogeneous agents. Areas that look promising for the 1996 microeconomics workshop are: interactive learning in economics and game theory, rational learning in repeated and recurring environments, evolutionary learning by boundedly rational agents, and the applications of learning models to industries, auctions, etc. The topics for the second and third years of the macroeconomics workshop and the second year of the microeconomics workshop will be decided at a later date. On the macro side, areas likely to be included are: acquired comparative advantage and the dynamics of international trade, the long-run distribution of income and wealth, technological change and diffusion, monetary and fiscal policy in growing economies, human capital accumulation and labor market dynamics, and the computation of equilibria for dynamic models. On the micro side, areas that look promising are: the role of information in auctions and asset pricing, contracts and the internal organization of firms, and the empirical implications of industrial organization models. The political economy workshop is planned for 1998. Topics include formal political theory and the formation of political institutions.