Virtual 96th Annual Conference

Preliminary Program (as of June 14)

A draft of the program is now available! Updates will be posted here regularly so check back often. The conference platform will launch in mid-June. Registrants will be invited to login and browse the program where they can add sessions to their schedule, access meeting links, etc.

Time Zones

Session times are listed in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). We are working to make concurrent session time periods suitable for presenters from around the world. Session participants are welcome to decide collectively what time period and day works best depending on their respective time zones. 

Conference Schedule

Sunday, June 27

6:00 am-7:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
8:00 am-9:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
10:00 am-11:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
12:00 pm-1:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
2:00 pm-3:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
4:00 pm-5:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
6:00 pm-7:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions

Monday, June 28

6:00 am-7:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
8:00 am-9:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
10:00 am-11:45 am -- 2020 Presidential Address by John Shoven "Is Automatic Enrollment Consistent with a Life Cycle Model?"
12:00 pm-1:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
2:00 pm-3:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
4:00 pm-5:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
6:00 pm-7:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions

Tuesday, June 29

6:00 am-7:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
8:00 am-9:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
10:00 am-11:45 am -- Keynote Address by Emi Nakamura "The Slope of the Phillips Curve: Evidence from U.S. States"
12:00 pm-1:45 pm -- 2021 Presidential Address by Alan Auerbach "Tax Policy with Low Interest Rates"
2:00 pm-3:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
4:00 pm-5:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
6:00 pm-7:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions

Wednesday, June 30

12:00 am-1:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
2:00 am-3:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
4:00 am-5:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
6:00 am-7:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
8:00 am-9:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
10:00 am-11:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
12:00 pm-1:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
2:00 pm-3:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
4:00 pm-5:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions
6:00 pm-7:45 pm -- Concurrent Sessions

Thursday, July 1

6:00 am-7:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
8:00 am-9:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions
10:00 am-11:45 am -- Concurrent Sessions

Conference Close

General Information

• Times are listed in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). Be sure to check your time conversion for the time zone from which you will be presenting. The conference platform will give you the option to convert times to your own time zone.
• Sessions are one hour and 45 minutes. Session time allocations (based on four papers): 15 minutes per paper presentation plus 5 minutes for the paper’s primary discussant, then time for all other participants’ discussion. The session chair may alter time allocations if appropriate.
• Technical hosts will setup a virtual meeting/webinar using the platform of their choice (preferably Zoom) at the session's designated day/time. That link will be embedded in the conference platform and will appear as a link on the session webpage.
• If all session participants are in agreement, we encourage the recording of sessions so that conference participants are able to go back and watch sessions they may not have been able to attend in person. Any recordings will be made available on the conference platform for seven days after the conference.
• For sessions that include individual discussants, they are assigned first paper to first discussant, second paper to second discussant, etc. However all session participants are expected to be familiar with all the papers in the session and to contribute to the discussion.
• By June 1, paper presenters must send their paper to all session participants. Group emails will be sent to each session to facilitate the exchange of papers. If you are unable to circulate your paper by June 1, contact your session chair and assigned discussant immediately to keep them apprised of your progress. 

Session Chairs

• Before the conference, facilitate communication amongst session participants.
• Follow up with your session participants to ensure papers are distributed to everyone in your session by June 1. Discus­sants have no obligation to discuss a late paper.
• During the conference, arrive at your virtual session a few minutes early and assure that your video and audio connections are working properly.
• Watch the clock and ensure that presenters and discussants stay within their allotted timeframes.
• After the session, complete the chair questionnaire you will receive after your session. Your feedback such as approximate session attendance helps us improve future conferences.

Technical Hosts

• Before the conference, configure a Zoom meeting/webinar and submit the meeting link/URL to [email protected] by June 11.
• If any of your session participants are not familiar with participating in a virtual meeting, perhaps host a practice run before the conference so that everyone can figure out screen sharing and such so that the day of the session runs more smoothly.
• During the conference, arrive at your virtual session early and help presenters with video/audio setup if needed.
• Confer with session participants and if all are in agreement, turn recording on so that the session can be made available for registrants to watch after the conference.
• If in use, monitor the virtual waiting room throughout the session to grant access to late arrivals (or disable the waiting room after the session begins).

Paper Presenters

• By June 1, send your paper to each participant in the session. Group emails will be sent to each session to facilitate the exchange of papers. Limit your paper to 15 to 25 double-spaced pages in order to not overburden your discussant and fellow participants. 
• In early June, WEAI will invite you to submit your abstract and PDFs of your full paper and slides for inclusion on the conference platform. This is optional but encouraged to facilitate better discussion during your session.
• During your session, stay within the allotted time (usually 15 minutes). Summarize the paper’s objective, methods, main points, and conclusions. Do not read your paper.

Tips on being an effective presenter from former Economic Inquiry Editor Bill Neilson:

• Do not go long. Going long means less time for feedback. It is much better to present only a small portion of your paper well than to go long and try to present the entire thing. Also, audience members punish presenters who go long by withdrawing their attention, and you do not want this. So, if anything, make your presentation shorter than 15 minutes and restrict attention to only things people absolutely have to know. The introduction should be short, and the literature review shorter, perhaps non-existent.

Discussants

• Before the conference, thoroughly read the paper you are assigned to discuss, and prepare comments to share with the author(s).
• During your session, be prepared to offer comments and constructive criticism. Plan your remarks to stay within the allotted time (usually 5 to 8 minutes). Each paper has a primary discussant, but everyone is urged to contribute to the discussion of all papers.

Tips on being an effective discussant from former Economic Inquiry Editor Bill Neilson:

1. Summarize the paper very quickly. This does two things: (1) it helps audience members who were not paying attention catch up with what you are about to say.  (2) it shows the author what you got out of the paper. Most referee reports begin with summaries of the paper, and these are valuable to the author because they show what points were most salient. 
2. Talk about how you would have approached the problem. This is great for sessions where participants all come from different specializations and so the different approaches would be interesting to hear.
3. Talk about strengths of the author’s approach. It is always nice for the author to hear something positive, but it is also good for the audience to learn what was especially good about the paper they just heard.
4. Talk about any strategies for improvement you can think of.
5. The key thing to remember in discussing a paper is that you are talking to the audience, not the author. The author is only one member of the audience, but you want to impress everyone. Serving as a discussant is a marketing opportunity for you, and you should use it to show any possible recruiter in the audience what a fantastic colleague you would be. So, your discussion should be a self-contained talk that everyone in the audience will understand, not just the author.

We will be crowdsourcing all of the virtual meeting technology for this conference from the considerable pool of experience you've all garnered over the past year working/teaching online. One participant in each session will volunteer to serve as the technical host and will set up and run the session using the meeting platform of their choice. Platforms being utilized for the virtual conference include Zoom, MS Teams, and WebEx. We are trying to standardize on Zoom to streamline session attendance, so the following terminology applies mainly to Zoom. 

It's most important that the session host is comfortable setting up and running the session, so we encourage you to use the configuration that will make the running of your session most efficient and familiar. 

Please submit your meeting link/URL to [email protected] by Friday, June 11. Session URLs will be kept behind a login-protected conference platform, access to which is being screened by WEAI. 

So that conference participants can go back and view sessions they may not have been able to attend live, if all participants in your session are willing to be recorded, turn on record at the start of your session and WEAI will make the session recordings available to conference attendees for seven days.

Configuration suggestions:

• If you are expecting a larger turnout for your session, a Zoom webinar setup may be beneficial for managing presenters and attendees. Session participants are designated as panelists. Session attendees are considered participants. A ZoomPro account is required to utilize the webinar setup.
• For a more casual session, a meeting set up will work well and will allow audience members to participate more freely in the discussion without having to use a Q&A feature to pose their comments.
• Duration of each session is one hour and 45 minutes, so set your meeting to start a few minutes earlier to allow everyone time to get connected and ready to present. If there are presenters in the session who are not familiar with using Zoom, a practice run might be in order a few days beforehand.
• Verify the time zone setting for your session. All times listed on the program are Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).
• Registration for your meeting/session should not be required to allow easier access for people who have already logged in through the conference platform.
• Please do not require a Zoom login for attendees, as this can block some conference registrants from outside the US from joining your session.
• Passwords are optional but encouraged, especially if you are using a static meeting ID. If utilized, please be sure to submit info to WEAI so that the password will be embedded in your meeting URL and visible in the conference platform
• Allow both phone and computer audio.
• Use the waiting room functionality to screen people coming into your session. Hosts will need to monitor the waiting room during the session for people who might be joining late, or disable the meeting room once the session has started.
• Assign all session presenters as co-hosts for the meeting to share controls over the administrative side of the session, such as managing participants. (Hover over a user’s video, click the icon with the three dots, and click Make Co-Host.)

Questions or comments? Please let us know.

Conference Registration

Fees below reflect virtual conference discount of 30% and apply to everyone participating in the conference whether on the program or not (after May 15, rates increase $45):

• US$185 $129.50 for members
• US$265 $185.50 for non-members
• US$95 $66.50 for student members
• US$135 $94.50 for student non-members

Discounts

• WEAI Institutional Member affiliates are eligible for a 20% discount on registration fees. For the code to take the discount at checkout, contact your designated representative or contact WEAI at [email protected].
• Early registration closes on May 15, after which fees increase $45. 

Benefits

• Access to all general and concurrent sessions.
• Waiver of manuscript submission fees for current WEAI members submitting their conference paper to Economic Inquiry or Contemporary Economic Policy by December 31, 2021.

Cancellation & Refund Policies

• Cancellations must be received in writing. Please e-mail [email protected].

• Program participants must advise the participants in their session(s) of their cancellation.

• Refunds for program participants:
  Volunteer abstract submission fees are non-refundable upon accept/reject decision. If a volunteer paper abstract is not accepted for the program, the full registration fee is refundable. For cancellation by a participant on or before March 1, fifty percent (50%) of registration fee is refundable. After March 1, the registration fee is non-refundable due to the high administrative cost of rearranging the affected sessions and participants.

• Refunds for all others, not on the program: 
  On or before June 1, the full registration fee is refundable, less $25 handling fee. After June 1, the registration fee is non-refundable.

• Membership dues are non-refundable.

• Refunds will be processed after the conference and are subject to a $25 handling fee.
   

Important Dates

March 1: Volunteer program participants' cancellation deadline with 50% refund.
May 1: Registration deadline for program participants.
May 15: $45 early registration discount ends.
June 1: Paper presenters circulate papers to all session participants.
June 1: Cancellation and refund deadline (for all except volunteer program participants, see March 1 above).
 

In spite of great progress with COVID-19 vaccines, given the limited supply of those vaccines in some places along with new variants of the virus circulating, we have made the tough decision to move the entire 96th Annual Conference program online.

Although the State of Hawai'i has guidelines in place that allow for safe tourism by individual visitors, it appears now that the restrictions on gatherings will remain in place beyond June thus necessitating our cancellaton of the in-person portion of the conference. The safety and health of our participants is top priority.

We will communicate individually with participants regarding the conversion to virtual, and will issue credits or refunds to those who wish to continue with the virtual program or those who wish to cancel their participation entirely.

By 2022 we should be in a better position to resume meeting in-person, so we hope you will plan to join us for WEAI's 100th birthday conference in Portland, Oregon, back to where the first meeting occurred in 1922 of 21 academics calling themselves the Pacific Coast Economic Association!

Please stay safe and healthy.

Designed to help students prepare for the highly-competitive job market, this program offers selected Ph.D. candidates hands-on experience in job-market paper presentation skills and interview techniques. Since 2009, the workshop has been held in conjunction with WEAI’s Annual Conference. 

2021 Selected Students and Workshop Groups

Group #1 |  Education, Health, and Labor
Advisor: Francisca M. Antman, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Fernanda Rojas-Ampuero, University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Economics
  Sent Away: Long-term Effects of Forced Displacements
• Ilaria D'Angelis, Boston College - Department of Economics
  Are We There? The Search for Amenities and the Early Career Gender Wage Gap among Highly Educated Workers
• Kaitlyn Sims, University of Wisconsin-Madison - Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
  Seeking Safe Harbors: Emergency Domestic Violence Shelters and Family Violence
• Luis Armona, Stanford University - Department of Economics
  Redesigning Federal Student Aid in Higher Education

Group #2 | Economics of Education, Health, and the Household
Advisor: Jane Ruseski, West Virginia University 

• Nikolai Boboshko, Cornell University - Department of Economics
  The Effect of Tenure Laws on Students: Evidence from the Implementation of Tenure Systems in the 20th Century
• Arian Seifoddini, University of California, Davis - Department of Economics
  How Does the Earned Income Tax Credit Affect Household Expenditures for Single Female Heads of Households?
• Sachintha Mendis, Colorado State University, Fort Collins - Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
  Food Acquisition and Time Use: A Demand System Approach
• Ernest Dorillas, Georgia State University - Department of Economics
  Distance and Quality Tradeoff: The Tale of US Rural Mothers

Group #3 | Applied Micro for Policy
Advisor: Jason Shogren, University of Wyoming 

• Karen Ortiz-Becerra, University of California, Davis - Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
  Land Concentration and Rural Labor Markets: Theory and Evidence from Colombia
• Eleanor Wiseman, University of California, Berkeley - Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
  Trade, Informality and Corruption: evidence from small-scale traders in Kenya
• John Moorehouse, University of Oregon - Department of Economics
  Carbon Taxes in Spatial Equilibrium
• Alexander Cardazzi, West Virginia University - Department of Economics
  Nudging and Driving: An Analysis of Dynamic Message Signs in Virginia

Group #4 | Dan's Applied Micro Group
Advisor: Daniel I. Rees, University of Colorado, Denver

• Maggie Shi, Columbia University - Department of Economics
  The Costs and Benefits of Monitoring: Evidence from Medicare Audits
• Arkadev Ghosh, University of British Columbia - Department of Economics 
  Religious Divisions, Production Technology and Firm Productivity: Experimental Evidence from India
• Robel Alemu, Tufts University - Department of Economics
  Impact of micronutrient deprivation on children’s health and later-life educational outcomes: Evidence from wartime disruption of iodized salt in Ethiopia
• Julieth Santamaria, University of Minnesota - Department of Applied Economics
  When a Stranger Shall Sojourn with Thee: The Impact of the Venezuelan Exodus on Colombian Labor Markets