More Glaeser

Eric posted yesterday on Ed Glaeser's upcoming Condliffe Lecture at the University of Canterbury. Some of you have if the talk will be videoed, given that you are not based on Christchurch. Absent any technical hitches, the talk will be posted on YouTube as part of the University's What If series of public lectures, a week or so after the talk.

But if you are based on Wellington, you can go one better. Why not register now for the annual conference of the New Zealand Assocation of Economists, which is taking place at the Amora Hotel in Wellington next week--Wednesday July 3 - Friday July 5. Ed is giving a keynote address at 4:00 on Wednesday. Other keynote speakers are Maurice Obstfeld of Berkeley, John Riley of UCLA, Mardi Dungey of U. Tasmania, and John Quiggin of U. Queensland (best known in the blogsphere as one of the authors at Crooked Timber).

Quite apart from the keynote addresses, the conference will also feature TVHE's Matt Nolan, who is presenting a paper and also participating in a panel discussion on the Open Banking Resolution, along with  Ian Woolford from the Reserve Bank and Bank critic, David Tripe; and I will be presenting my work on Do Catches win Matches. Groping to Bethlehem's and Association Vice President, Bill Kaye-Blake, is not giving a paper this year, but he will be at the conference.

The full conference web site including the link to registration and the programme is here. I hope to see as many of you there as possible.

Conference Wrap Up

The annual NZAE conference is now gone and I can turn my hand back to blogging. I am hardly a disinterested observer, so I won’t comment much on the conference itself—James and Bill have already done so, anyway, in a more timely manner. A few random thoughts occur, however.

• It was great to see Matt at the conference; having a dedicated roundtable on blogging seems to have worked as a Trojan Horse as he is now promising to submit a paper next year.
• Next year, I should try and jig the schedule so that I don’t have another commitment on at the time that James is presenting. Despite his attending the past three conferences (at least), I have not had the opportunity to see him present. It is not a deliberate snub, James.
• Finally, I was interested in Berk Ozler’s comments on the academic culture in New Zealand at his Development Impact blog, following his participation in the blogging session at the conference: Berk says that

For those of you not familiar, the discussion at a typical seminar or conference presentation [in New Zealand] goes quite differently than it would in an academic setting in the U.S.: the audience generally avoids interrupting the speaker and the questions and the discussion are very polite.

I think Berk is right about the culture of the NZAE conference, and that is something we like to encourage. It is a broad-church affair bringing together economists with a range of backgrounds from the academic, government and private sectors, and polite, constructive interactions are an important part of that. But I am hoping we can get Berk up to give a seminar at Canterbury, where we can try to replicate the culture of a U.S. academic setting, :-)