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Subject: Conference on behavioral public finance
Dear Public Finance Colleague:
Edward McCaffery of USC Law School and I are organizing a conference this winter on the topic of "behavioral public finance." With that title we mean to cover the implications for public finance of behavioral regularities that don't conform to the standard models of decision-making, of the kind that have been investigated by Richard Thaler, Matthew Rabin, and others. The conference will include theoretical modeling of these issues, empirical investigations of this behavior, and examinations of the implications of non-standard behavioral regularities for the design of policy. We are inviting, and have already received some commitments from, outstanding academics from economics, psychology, and law.
The conference will take place at USC beginning on Friday, February 7, 2003 at 1:00 p.m. and ending on Saturday, February 8 at 4:30 p.m. We can pay for transportation and lodging for presenters (and discussants), but cannot offer an honorarium. We do not intend to publish the proceedings, so presenting here does not preclude you from seeking publication of your work in a journal or elsewhere. The objective of the conference is to exchange ideas and get people up to speed on what is going on in this area.
I write today to inquire about whether you are interested in presenting next February. If you are, the next step is to send me an abstract of your research plan or a completed paper. Ed and I will see what people are working on and assemble the program from there. If you are interested in attending and/or being a discussant, but do not wish to present, pass that along to me, too. Finally, if you know of good work by someone who might not be receiving this letter (so far sent just to the NBER public economics family), I'd really appreciate hearing about that.
I look forward to hearing from you, and hopefully to seeing you at USC in February.
Joel Slemrod
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