The NBER Reporter 2012 Number 2: Conferences

Innovation Policy and the Economy
Twenty-seventh Annual Conference on Macroeconomics
Universities-Research Conference on Insurance Markets and Catastrophe Risk

The NBER's thirteenth annual Conference on Innovation Policy and the Economy took place in Washington on April 17. The conference was organized by NBER Research Associates Josh Lerner of Harvard University and Scott Stern of Northwestern University. The following papers were discussed:

Pierre Azoulay, MIT and NBER; Joshua S. Graff Zivin, University of California, San Diego and NBER; and Gustavo Manso, University of California at Berkeley, "NIH Peer Review: Problems and Avenues for Reform"

Fiona Murray, MIT Sloan School of Management, "Evaluating the Role of Science Philanthropy in American Research Universities"

Josh Lerner, "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Innovation Policy and Entrepreneurship"

Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School, "Fixing the Patent Office"

Jeffrey L. Furman, Boston University and NBER, "The Economics of the America COMPETES Acts"

Summaries of these papers may be found here.

The NBER's Twenty-seventh Annual Conference on Macroeconomics, organized by Research Associates Daron Acemoglu of MIT, Jonathan Parker or Northwestern University, and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, took place in Cambridge on April 20 and 21. These papers were discussed:

Tobias Adrian, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Paolo Colla, Universita Bocconi; and Hyun Song Shin, Princeton University and NBER, "Which Financial Frictions? Parsing the Evidence from the Financial Crisis of 2007-9"

Timothy J. Besley, London School of Economics; Neil Meads, Bank of England; and Paolo Surico, London Business School, "Risk Heterogeneity and Credit Supply: Evidence from the Mortgage Market"

Raj Chetty, Harvard University and NBER, Adam Guren, Harvard University; Day Manoli, University of California at Los Angeles and NBER; and Andrea Weber, University of Mannheim, "Does Indivisible Labor Explain The Difference Between Micro And Macro Elasticities? A Meta-Analysis of Extensive Margin Elasticities" (NBER Working Paper No. 16729)

Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, "Roads to Prosperity or Bridges to Nowhere? Theory and Evidence on the Impact of Public Infrastructure Investment"

Etienne Gagnon and David Lopez-Salido, Federal Reserve Board, and Nicolas Vincent, HEC Montreal, "Individual Price Adjustment along the Extensive Margin"

Mark Bils, University of Rochester and NBER; Peter J. Klenow, Stanford University and NBER; and Benjamin Malin, Federal Reserve Board, "Testing for Keynesian Labor Demand"

Summaries of these papers may be found here.

The NBER held a Universities Research Conference in Cambridge on "Insurance Markets and Catastrophe Risk" on May 11 and 12, 2012. NBER Research Associates Kenneth Froot of Harvard Business School and Howard Kunreuther of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Erwann Michel-Kerjan, also of the Wharton School, organized the conference and chose these papers for discussion:

Dwight Jaffee, University of California at Berkeley, and Thomas Russell, Santa Clara University, "The Welfare Economics of Catastrophic Loss"

Antony Millner, University of California at Berkeley, "On Welfare Frameworks and Catastrophic Climate Risks"

Emek Basker, University of Missouri, and Javier Miranda, Bureau of the Census, "Taken by Storm: Business Survival in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina"

Tatyana Deryugina, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "The Role of Transfer Payments in Mitigating Shocks: Evidence from the Impact of Hurricanes"

Jing Cai, University of California at Berkeley, "Social Networks and the Decision to Insure: Evidence from Randomized Experiments in China"

Shawn A. Cole, Harvard University; Xavier Gine, The World Bank; and James Vickery, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, "How Does Risk Management Influence Production Decisions? Evidence from a Field Experiment"

Raghav Gaiha, University of Delhi; Kenneth Hill, Harvard University; and Ganesh Thapa, International Fund for Agricultural Development "Have Natural Disasters Become Deadlier?"

Enrico Biffis, Imperial College Business School, and Pietro Millossovich, Cass Business School, "Optimal Insurance with Counterparty Default Risk"

Bartosz Mackowiak, European Central Bank, and Mirko Wiederholt, Northwestern University, "Inattention to Rare Events"

Barry Goodwin, North Carolina State University, "Copula-Based Models of Systemic Risk in U.S. Agriculture: Implications for Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Contracts"

Charles Huyck, ImageCat, Inc., and Adam Rose, University of Southern California, "Improving Catastrophe Modeling for Business Interruption Insurance Needs"

S. Erik Oppers, Ken Chikada, Patrick A. Imam, and John Kiff, International Monetary Fund, and Michael Kisser, Norwegian School of Economics, "The Financial Impact of Longevity Risk"

Thomas R. Berry-Stoelzle, University of Georgia; Greg Nini, University of Pennsylvania; and Sabine Wende, University of Cologne, "External Financing in the Life Insurance Industry: Evidence from the Financial Crisis"

Summaries of these papers may be found here.