The aim of this summer school is to introduce young macroeconomists to experimental approaches of research. Macroeconomic theories have traditionally been tested using non-experimental "field" data.  However, modern, micro-founded macroeconomic models can also be tested in the laboratory, and researchers are increasingly pursuing such experimental tests. Graduate students and young faculty specializing in macroeconomics or experimental economics are invited to attend this intensive 5-day summer school.

The summer school will be held from June 24 to 30, 2019 at Carleton University, Canada. Students will be taught experimental methods and are introduced to various topics of experimental research relevant for macroeconomics, such as growth, labor, monetary exchange, financial crises, equilibrium selection and stability. Students will be asked to participate in experiments and to develop their own experimental macroeconomic projects in groups of 3 or 4 students. Faculty will assist with and critique these projects. The different links on the top of this page will give you access to details regarding the particulars of the summer school in experimental macroeconomics.

The summer school consists of 5 days of teaching with 9-10 lectures of 90 minutes by the faculty, 4-5 experiments, 5 group sessions of 90 minutes each, and a final session in which student groups present their proposals and get comments from the faculty. Faculty members will also help during the group sessions for counseling students. Students can also submit research proposals as part of their summer school application, though this is not a requirement for participation in the summer school. Indeed, one purpose of the summer school is to start new research projects and think of macroeconomic topics and models that can be implemented in the laboratory or in field experiments in a way that advances our knowledge of behavior and our understanding of macroeconomics. Past participants have published articles based on their summer school projects in high-ranked journals.

Summer school students are expected to attend the 2-day 10th BESLab International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics from June 25-26, 2019 that will take place at the Bank of Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

The deadline for applications is April 1, 2019. The participation fee is 300 Euros/350 USD /450 CAD. There is a possibility of financial support to students who need financial assistance subject to funding availability.

The accommodations are in Leeds House: 1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON K1S 5R1 (https://conferenceservices.carleton.ca/suite/). The rate is $60/night + taxes.

Lecturers and Organizers

• Gabriele Camera (Chapman University and University of Bologna )
• John Duffy (University of California, Irvine)
• Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and  Barcelona GSE)
• Luba Petersen (Simon Fraser University)
• Jasmina Arifovic (Simon Fraser University)
• Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam)

Organizers 

• Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Janet Jiang (Bank of Canada)

An intensive 5-day summer school devoted to instructing macroeconomists in experimental methods will be offered on the main campus Carleton University, Canada, from June 24-30, 2018. The aim of the summer school will be both to promote experimental methods among macroeconomists and to assist with and critique participants' proposals for macroeconomic experiments.

Additionally, students of the summer school are invited to the 2-day 10th BESLab International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics from June 25-26 to held at the Bank of Canada.

There are many insights to be gained from controlled laboratory experimentation that cannot be obtained using standard macroeconometric approaches, i.e., econometric analyses of the macroeconomic data reported by government agencies. Often the data most relevant to testing a macroeconomic model are simply unavailable. There may also be identification, endogeneity and equilibrium selection issues that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using econometric methods. Indeed, Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas (1986) was among the first macroeconomist to make such observations and he invited laboratory tests of rational expectations macroeconomic models. The summer school will review the experimental literature in macroeconomics that has arisen in the 30 years since Lucas's invitation. A tentative schedule of topics to be covered is given below.

Some information

Room locations:

• Classroom activities: Leeds House 124
• Experimental demonstrations: VSIM 3228

​Dinner: 

We will be having the Summer School dinner at 8 pm on Thursday at EVOO Greek Kitchen located at 438 Preston St, Ottawa, ON K1S 4N4.

Some details about transit: 

• Cooperation among strangers with and without a monetary system (Gabriele Camera)
• Behavioral & experimental macroeconomics and policy analysis: a complex systems approach (Cars Hommes)
• Overview of Macroeconomic Experiments (John Duffy)
• Intertemporal Optimization (John Duffy)
• Asset Pricing (John Duffy)

June 24: Introduction

June 25 and 26: Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics Workshop (Bank of Canada)

June 27: Money and Banking

June 28: Dynamic Optimization

June 29: Monetary Policy Experiments

June 30: Asset Pricing

Gabriele Camera

Gabriele Camera is Professor of Economics and Finance at the Economic Science Institute, Chapman University. He is also Professor of Macroeconomics at University of Bologna on a part-time basis. His research interest spans several areas, including economic theory, experimental economics, industrial organization, labor economics, macroeconomics and monetary economics. 

Selected publications:

Camera G., and J. Kim. Dynamic directed search. Economic Theory, 62(1), pp. 131-154.

Camera, G., and A. Gioffrè (2014). Game-theoretic foundations of monetary equilibrium. Journal of Monetary Economics 63, 51–63.

Camera, G., and M. Casari (2014). The coordination value of monetary exchange: experimental evidence. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 6(1), 290–314.

Camera, G., and Y. Chien (2014). Understanding the distributional impact of long-run inflation. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 46(6), 1137–1170.

Camera, G., M. Casari, and M. Bigoni (2013). Money and trust among strangers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(37), 14889–14893.

John Duffy

John Duffy is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. Duffy’s research explores issues in macroeconomics and finance using models and laboratory experiments.

Selected publications:

"An Experimental Study of Bond Market Pricing" with Matthias Weber and Arthur Schram, Journal of Finance, 73, 2018, 1857-1892.

"Heterogeneous Agent Modeling: Experimental Evidence" with Jasmina Arifovic, in: C. Hommes and B. LeBaron (Eds.), Handbook of Computational Economics Volume 4, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2018, pp. 491-540.

"Macroeconomics: A Survey of Laboratory Research" in J.H. Kagel and A.E. Roth (Eds.), The Handbook of Experimental Economics Vol. 2, Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 1-90.

"Gift Exchange versus Monetary Exchange: Theory and Evidence" with Daniela Puzzello, American Economic Review 104, 2014, 1735-1776.

Rosemarie Nagel

Rosemarie Nagel is ICREA research professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF-BGSE), research director of the experimental laboratory (LEEX-UPF), and member of CESifo. She earned her PhD in the European Doctoral Program at the University of Bonn (1994). Her research interest is in experimental economics, behavioural economics, and neuro economics.

Selected publications:

"The agencies method for coalition formation in experimental games," (with John Nash Jr, Axel Ockenfels, and Reinhard Selten), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Dec. 11, 2012, 109 (50), 20358-20363.

"Measuring Strategic Uncertainty in Coordination Games" (with Frank Heinemann and Peter Ockenfels), Review of Economic Studies, 76, 2009, pp. 181-221.

"Neural correlates of depth of strategic reasoning in medial prefrontal cortex" (with Giorgio Coricelli), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Economic Sciences,

PNAS June 9, 2009 vol. 106 no. 23 9163-9168

"One, Two, (Three), Infinity...: Newspaper and Lab Beauty-Contest Experiments", (with Antoni Bosch-Domènech, Jose García-Montalvo, and Albert Satorra), American Economic Review December 92 (5), 2002, pp 1687-1701.

Luba Petersen

Luba Petersen is Associate Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on expectations and decision making in macroeconomic environments. She develops procedures for implementing macroeconomies in controlled laboratory experiments to study policy-relevant questions. Her recent research investigates the ability of monetary policy and central bank communication to stabilize and guide expectations and markets. She is studying the determinants of effective communication to the public as well as financial markets. Another branch of her work explores how people reason through dynamic optimization problems and whether their ability can be improved through effective tools and education. She actively consults for the Bank of Canada on behavioural and experimental macroeconomic topics.

Selected Publications:

“Deflating asset price bubbles with leverage constraints and monetary policy” (with Guidon Fenig and Mariya Mileva), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2018), vol. 155, 1-27.

“Stabilizing expectations at the zero lower bound: Experimental evidence” (with Jasmina Arifovic), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2017), vol. 82, 21-43.

“Distributing scarce jobs and output: Experimental evidence on the dynamic effects of rationing” (with Guidon Fenig), Experimental Economics (2017), vol. 20, no.3., 707-735.

“Does Money Illusion Matter?: Comment” (with Abel Winn), American Economic Review (2014), vol. 104, no. 3, 1047-1062.

“Recent Developments in Experimental Macroeconomics” (with Robert Amano and Oleksiy Kryvtsov), Bank of Canada Review, Autumn 2014, 1-11.

Cars Hommes

Cars Hommes is professor of Economic Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF), an interdisciplinary research group on complex systems application in economics and finance. He is the author of the recent book Behavioral Rationality and Heterogeneous Expectations in Complex Economic Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2013. His current research focusses on behavioral and experimental macroeconomics & finance.

Selected publications:

Hommes, C.H. (2018), "Behavioral & experimental macroeconomics and policy analysis: a complex systems approach", ECB Working Paper, No. 2201, November 2018.

Anufriev, M. & Hommes, C.H. (2012), "Evolutionary selection of individual expectations and aggregate outcomes", American Economic Journal–Micro 4 (4), 35-64.

Anufriev, M., Hommes, C.H. and Makarewicz, T. (2019), "Simple forecasting heuristics that make us smart: evidence from different market experiments", Journal European Economic Association, forthcoming.

Hommes, C.H., Massaro, D. and Weber, M. (2019), "Monetary policy under behavioral expectations: theory and experiment", European Economic Review 118, 193-212.

Bao, T., Hennequin, M., Hommes, C.H. and Massaro, D. (2019), "Coordination on bubbles in large group asset pricing experiments", Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control, forthcoming.

To participate in our Summer School, please do the following steps.

Application - Deadline: April 1^st, 2019

1. Send to [email protected] one attached file: File should be your Curriculum Vitae in a email with the following subject: BLEESS19_cv_firstname_last_name.
2. Fill the following application form. You will see a confirmation message after submitting the form. Before, remember to send your curriculum to [email protected]
3. Letter of Recommendation:
   
   Please ask the person who gives you the letter of recommendation to send it as an attached PDF document to the address [email protected], with the following subject:
   BLEESS19_Letter_firstname_lastname
   
   Please contact us at [email protected] for another way for sending us the letter, such as ordinary mail or fax, but we strongly encourage to use the e-mail and PDF option to speed up the process.

Registration

Students who have been accepted for the school in the first round will be informed by April 15 and have three options: 

• Students who still plan to participate must register between April 15, 2019 and April 30, 2019. Together with the registration, a registration fee of 300 Euros/350 USD /450 CAD needs to be paid (see below). 
• Students who no longer plan to participate should inform us as soon as possible, in any case before April 30, 2019. 
• Students who need accommodation must make a reservation at the residence announced in the acceptance letter until May 13, 2019.

NOTE: The application for the Summer School is closed.