KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
David Autor is Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics. His scholarship explores the labour-market impacts of technological change and globalisation on job polarisation, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.
Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of Labour Economics—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship.
In 2017, Autor was recognised by Bloomberg as one of the 50 people who defined global business. In March of 2019, he was christened "Twerpy MIT Economist, David Autor" by John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, during a segment on automation and employment. Autor is currently figuring out how to merchandise this title.
Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California Berkeley where she also co-directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. Her research focuses on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. She is a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Review: Insights. Recently, she has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, the State of California Task Force on Lifting Children and Families out of Poverty, and the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making. In 2014, she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association.
Dr. Hoynes received her PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Colby College in 1983.
INVITED SPEAKERS
Jérôme Adda earned his Ph.D in Economics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) after studying biology at AgroParisTech and economics and statistics at ENSAE in Paris. He is a Professor of Economics at Bocconi since 2014. Prior to that he was a professor at the European University Institute (Florence), as well as a professor at University College London. He has been a visiting Associate Professor at the economics department at Berkeley in 2006-07. He was a managing editor for the Review of Economic Studies, 2013-2017.​
His research interests include health economics, labour economics and macroeconomics. His work has investigated the effect of public policies on health behaviour, the links between income and health, the role of transport infrastructure in disseminating viral epidemics, fertility and labour supply, and the role of human capital on career choices over the life cycle. Many of his papers have been published in journals such as the JPE, the AER or the QJE.
Before joining the W. P. Carey School of Business at the Arizona State University, Basit Zafar served for more than eight years in various capacities in the Research Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as a visiting faculty member at Princeton University. His research is focused on labour economics, economics of education, and household finance. Specifically, his work seeks to understand how individuals make decisions under uncertainty. Zafar’s research employs a disparate set of empirical methods and techniques, including the use of subjective expectations data and experimental data.
Seema Jayachandran is a Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on economic issues in developing countries, including children's health and education, environmental conservation, gender equality, and labour markets. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Early Career Development grant. She currently serves as co-editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is also a board member and chair of the gender sector for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Development Economics program. Since 2017, she has been a contributing columnist for the New York Times business section.
Prior to joining Northwestern, she was a faculty member at Stanford University. She earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
Yves Zenou is a Professor of Economics and holds the Richard Snape Chair in Business and Economics at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). Yves Zenou is also affiliated to the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN, Stockholm), the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn). He is Elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and Fellow of the Regional Science Association International and received the 2018 Dean's Award for Excellence in Research. His research interests include social networks, urban and labour issues, development economics, crime and identity.