Category Archives: notes

That's Tirole

You know you will not be able to understand some big guys' speech, but you still want to torture yourself and see them. That's exactly what I did last night for Tirole. Well, not until last night had I realized how bad my micro foundation was and how poor my knowledge of finance was.

It was one of the "Barcelona GSE Lecture Series", and

Prof. Jean Tirole (Toulouse School of Economics)

"Regulating systemic risk"

Hence, with the words "risk" and "regulation", you can imagine what he was talking about. I knew so little about finance, and then it became a disaster for me to stay there. In contrast, a friend who sat besides me was really enjoying the lecture and benefited a lot - he is a Ph.D in Econ/Finance. That's fair~

Anyway, it is a little out of my initial expectation but fair, that in UPF, the traditional Macro school, I have touched more macro compared to micro, although I was so interested in micro. Maybe it is a good thing that I do not need to close myself within a narrow room. Who knows? You can never go back and do something different. Whatever I have archived, I appreciate.

Barcelona GSE Lecture Serie"Barcelona GSE Lecture Series

Heckman's talk on inequity

Today, I was so luck to have enjoyed Heckman's speech. As usual, the information is attached here:

MOVE Distinguished Visitor Lecture
Speaker: James Heckman
Date: March 24, 2011

Heckman is well-known for the development of theoretical and empirical models of human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood education.

To be honest, I know Heckman because of his famous contribution to theoretical econometrics - actually, I just learned Heckman two-step estimation this month... Then he came here, and I got the chance to see the "real" version. Out of my expectation, he is such a good speaker! I concentrated on his speech for two continuous hours without a second to relax. OMG... I thought he was a technical guy - from the typical impression he should not care about anything else but math... However, I was totally wrong! He also works a lot on applications and empirical works which reflects the responsibility of a real economist. Like today, he talked about inequity. Although he was going to "sell" his academic idea, it was so good and so intuitive that can really convince you what is going on in the real world. So fresh, and comes to you with tons of inspirations.  Nice~

Tomorrow the more academic-targeted workshop will take place in UAB. Last time when I went to MOVE's workshop, there were only 20 people in a very big lecture hall and some of them were even sleeping... This time, from today's observation, I think there will be over 100 people tomorrow, and a big proportion of them will be brilliant researchers. It should be impressive. The basic info is attached here:

ICREA-MOVE Conference on Family Economics

Program Committee:Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Christopher Flinn, Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and James Heckman
Local organization: Nezih Guner
Date: March 25-26, 2011
Venue: Campus de Bellaterra-UAB

It is so nice to enjoy this kind of high-quality workshop here in Barcelona. Fortunately, I think the school here, as well as those nice organizers, really encourage students to take part in these kinds of seminars. Therefore, most time I can just walk in the conference room and pick a seat without registering in advance. Thank them so much for tolerating me -_-||

Oh one thing at last. Yesterday dear Ghazala also offered a seminar on her own research, which focused on gender difference in the labor market:

LABOUR/PUBLIC/DEVELOPMENT FACULTY LUNCH
Date: 23/03/2011
Speaker: Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer (UPF)
Title: Gender Inequality, Performance Pay and Young Professionals

Since it was her, it had no reason to be not good.Meanwhile, the active audiences were impressive as they had always been.

Moreover, today there was also another Chinese professor who talked about his economic history research,

ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS HISTORY SEMINAR SERIES
Date: 24/03/2011
Speaker: Debin Ma (LSE)
Title: Rock, Scissors, Paper: the Problem of Incentives and Information in Traditional Chinese State and the Origin of Great Divergence

I did not have enough time for this presentation, since the time was a little conflicted with Heckman's speech. However, I stayed there for half an hour and got the basic idea what was going on. It seemed that he was talking about the popular issue "Great Divergence （中文相当于李约瑟之谜）", and reminded me the time when I read Kenneth Pomeranz (彭慕兰)'s book last year:

  • Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton University Press, 2001).

When it comes to China, I cannot just stand there and say "I do not care", right? But the Great Divergence is not only a question on China, but also for the whole world. Institution or technology? All of us are curious which one drives the economy to grow on earth...

A Piece of Note

Just a quick piece of note before the intensive exam time.

I did not really remember how many seminars I went in the past month... well, anyway. Here is just a note that I have been to Thijs' seminar:

Labour/Public/Development Lunch

Benedikt Herz and Thijs van Rens (UPF)

"Structural Unemployment"

That's really all.... no time to say more, and next week a plenty of interesting seminars are waiting... however, all the exams are waiting there as well... what a painful dilemma~~~

With consideration of India

I don't know why but recently I have read tons of papers somewhat related to India, one big neighbor of China. Historically, when I was in China I didn't pay enough attention to India, expect for the last year when I was reading some papers on development and experiments. It seems that many economists like to target on India. The reason may be that India has a very large population, or the intervention from government is less compared countries like China.

Development issues are spilled all over the world. Even if in the developed countries, the social problems like racial discrimination, homosexual marriage, public health care, immigration, etc. are still remaining unsolved. However, in particularly from the economic perspective, it seems more possible to identify the cause or the so-called treatment effect with experiments, either natural or implemented by people. Therefore, to find a place without those targeting treatments before will be the ideal place to actually design and implement those trials. Of course, both those undeveloped countries in Africa and developing countries in Asia and South America will be good candidates. Among those, as an English-speaking country with huge population, India stands out.

It may not be fair to say that I care India more from the academic perspective rather than a more natural cultural attractiveness. India has its great culture by many means, which are worthy respecting. More often, I have been shocked by the diversity of cultural things. It is very hard for a person to judge something unbiased, or to tolerate the cultural difference easily. However, I’m trying to know more about it before making a judgment.  My logic is very simple: you can only say something about one particular thing if you really know it well. Otherwise, imagination won’t help you to get a clear idea about what went, have gone and will go on in the future.

Although India and China are both regarded as the “eastern cultures”, the difference is still large. Religions, institutions, economic features… for instance, the area of arable land is bigger than what China has. Therefore, even the population grows in India is somehow out of control, they can still sustain (well, although the life standard is very low). Moreover, the confliction among religions is another big problem for India. Yes we have 56 ethnic groups in China, but Han counts for the primary group. In India, it is not as simple as this…

I’m feeling that now it is worthy spending time on learning a culture entirely instead of merely having a glance at it from several limited angles. A good way to start shall be movies. Yes, they have many fantastic movies 🙂