Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
"Robust Macroeconomic Policy"
November 2011
The Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy is now soliciting
papers for a conference on "Robust Macroeconomic Policy." This
conference will be held in Pittsburgh, at the Tepper School of Business,
Carnegie Mellon University, on November 11-12, 2011. The papers and
comments are slated for publication in a special issue of the Journal of
Monetary Economics in July 2012.
During the financial crisis and the subsequent "great recession",
economists lamented the lack of policy guidance provided by standard
economic models for a situation that didn't seem to conform to classical
theories of risk aversion. The prevailing view was that agents and
policy makers were unable to characterize the economic environment with
a single probability distribution. Moreover, concern for the worst-case
scenario, rather than the expected value, seemed to rule both private
decisions and public policy. In the words of Fed Chairman Bernanke,
"The profound uncertainty associated with the 'unknown unknowns' during
the crisis resulted in panicky selling by investors, sharp cuts in
payrolls by employers, and significant increases in households'
precautionary saving." There is now a substantial body of theoretical
work on robustness, Knightian uncertainty, and ambiguity that can form
the foundation for policy analysis. This conference is an opportunity
see how these new methods and theoretical advances can inform
traditional macroeconomic policy issues such as optimal monetary policy,
financial intermediation and regulation, fiscal policy, and labor and
capital market policies.
The editors invite detailed abstracts of no more than two pages
describing the proposed research paper. (If a preliminary version of the
paper is available, authors may include it with their abstract.)
Proposals should be submitted electronically to Sue North, Editorial
Assistant for the Journal of Monetary Economics, no later than April 4,
2011, at north_at_simon.rochester.edu. The editors, in collaboration with
the Carnegie-Rochester Advisory Board, will make the final selection of
papers to be included in the Conference. Authors will be notified by May
20, 2011 if their paper has been selected. Authors will receive an
honorarium of $2500 and be expected to present their paper at the
Conference. The papers should represent original research not presented
or published elsewhere. Since the papers are intended for publication,
authors will not be able to publish or reprint the work elsewhere
without the permission of the editors and publisher. Please note that
the editors will contact authors only if their paper is accepted.
Received on Thu Jan 20 2011 - 14:45:32 EST
