33rd NBER-TCER-CEPR TRIO Conference on Migration

The causes and consequences of international and domestic migration are of relevance to many areas of economic policy and intersect with core questions of several economics subfields. Migration affects labor markets, housing markets, and macro variables such as inflation and the unemployment rate. And low birth rates mean that migration may determine whether the populations of regions or countries as a whole decline.

The 33rd TRIO conference, jointly sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Tokyo Center for Economic Research (TCER), and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), will focus on the economic causes and consequences of migration, both within and across countries. The conference is organized by Joshua Hausman (NBER), Kenichi Ueda (CEPR), and Shin-ichi Fukuda (TCER). It will include roughly 6-8 paper presentations and will be held at the University of Tokyo on Saturday-Sunday, May 9-10, 2026. The conference will conclude by 12:30pm on Sunday, May 10, thus allowing participants to fly back to North America that day.

The organizers welcome submissions on international immigration, domestic migration, and related topics. Theoretical and empirical work from all subfields of economics will be considered, and the research need not be related to Japan.  

Papers by researchers with and without NBER affiliations and from researchers at all career stages are welcome. Please share this call for papers with other interested researchers.  

Papers presented at the conference may be submitted to a special issue of the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies (JJIE), and authors are encouraged to consider this outlet for their work. If a paper is published in the JJIE, the author(s) will receive a total honorarium of JPY200,000, which can be divided among multiple authors. Papers submitted to the JJIE will undergo the normal journal reviewing process.

The deadline for submitting papers is 11:59pm eastern time January 16, 2026. Papers may be submitted by following this link.

Preference will be given to completed papers and to detailed drafts. Selected authors will be notified by January 30, 2026. The NBER and local organizers will cover travel and hotel expenses for one North America-based author of each paper to attend the conference. Other authors are welcome to attend at their own expense. Workshop attendance is by invitation only. Please direct questions to Joshua Hausman (hausmanj@umich.edu).