I am pleased to announce an NBER Conference on Economic Aspects of
Obesity at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on
Monday and Tuesday, November 10-11, 2008. Primary support of the
conference will be provided by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation to the NBER. I just received that grant. Funds for lodging
and meals will be provided by a grant from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of
Louisiana to the LSU Department of Economics. The conference will
consist of twelve papers, with one discussant per paper. The conference
proceedings will be published by the University of Chicago Press. I
will edit that volume.
In October 2006, I contacted a number of economists who were doing work
on obesity concerning their interest in presenting a paper at a
conference. Based on that correspondence, I included a list of
potential authors and papers to be presented at the conference in a
proposal that I submitted to the Johnson Foundation. At While seventeen
potential papers were included listed, only twelve can be presented at
the conference. Therefore, I cannot consider additional papers for
presentation at the conference, although I may be in the market for
discussants.
The spring 2008 meeting of the Health Economics Program will take place
on Friday, April 25 at the NBER in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The
meeting will serve as a pre-conference for the obesity conference. Half
an hour will be allocated to each of the twelve papers to be presented
at the November 2008 conference. I realize that not all authors will
have empirical results by the spring meeting, but I think it will be
very useful for them to get feedback on their papers prior to the
conference. In light of the pre-conference, I will not request papers
for presentation at the spring meeting.
Michael Grossman
National Bureau of Economic Research
365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York, New York 10016-4309
212-817-7959 (phone)
212-817-1597 (fax)
mgrossman_at_gc.cuny.edu (e-mail)
https://wfs.gc.cuny.edu/MGrossman/www/ (home page)
Received on Wed Jan 16 2008 - 15:39:31 EST
