Welcome

EEA President's Welcome

A very warm welcome to the 2022 EEA Congress! Time to say good-bye to speaking on mute, to formal shirts worn over tracksuit bottoms, to pets pouncing from blurred backgrounds….. We look forward to seeing you in the wonderful city of Milan where our hosts at Bocconi University are getting everything ready to make our congress fun and productive within their spectacular campus. 

To mark the occasion, Monica Costa-Dias and Paolo Surico, with their dedicated programme committee, have put together a wonderful programme with keynotes by Philipp Kircher and Michèle Tertilt. Both speakers have kindly agreed to hold an informal networking session with a selected group of young faculty (details on how to take part in these networking sessions being organised throughout the congress will be communicated soon). Special thanks to Massimiliano Marcellino from Bocconi University for his enthusiasm and impeccable hospitality. Saving the best for last, Gemma - familiar to us all - has exceeded all expectations once again, making our return to 3D much better than we could hope for (she even made me delete the ban on tracksuit bottoms).

Oriana Bandiera, EEA President 2022

ES President’s Welcome

It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to the European Meeting of the Econometric Society, to Bocconi University, and to the city of Milan. I, like all of you, am very pleased to be holding the ESEM 2022 in person and especially at Bocconi University, to which of course I am strongly personally attached.

The collaboration between the Econometric Society and Bocconi University has been gratifying for both organizations and is in line with Bocconi University’s prominent role in economics and econometrics.

The Econometric Society is one of the few truly global associations for academic economists and has been over decades an important organization guiding the development of economics and econometrics. In addition to publishing its three world-class journals, the Society is deeply committed to working with its six regions – Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, Latin America and North America – bringing economists together through its 10 annual regional meetings, up to six regional summer and winter schools, plus two recently added international summer schools in Dynamic and Structural Econometrics. So successful has been the Society in its mission to promote statistics and mathematical methods that this now permeates all aspects of economics.  It is a great honor for me to be part of the Society, to serve as its President this year, and to participate in this and other meetings around the globe. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, or just learning about the Econometric Society and Bocconi University, we hope you remain engaged with both organizations throughout your careers. 

We are especially excited to welcome you to the newly modernized campus of Bocconi University and the beautiful city of Milan. We hope you discover and enjoy a bit of the Italian charm and walk through Bocconi University’s newest state-of-the art buildings, appreciating the charm and architecture as the backdrop for our line-up of distinguished invited and contributed speakers.

We welcome an audience of close to 1,200 registered participants from many countries around the World. We are excited to present to you five invited sessions and 102 contributed events featuring some of the world’s leading economists. In particular, let me draw your attention to our two keynote speakers, Costas Meghir (Yale University) who will be presenting the Fisher-Schultz Lecture and Emir Kamenica (University of Chicago Booth School of Business), who will present the Laffont Lecture, and I look forward to presenting the President’s address. Also, on the last day of the EEA-ESEM, Friday August 26, Jaap Abbring (Tilburg University), will present the Sargan lectures. In addition, Econometrica’s editor and Nobel laureate Guido Imbens has been invited by Bocconi University to give a lecture titled “`In Search of the Third Number: What to report beyond Point Estimates and Standard Errors'' at the start of the Congress.

We are thrilled to be able to live-stream sessions through Zoom so that those of you who were not able to attend in person will be able to enjoy the EEA-ESEM. We hope you enjoy this unique hybrid format and take advantage of all it has to offer.

Finally, I want to recognize everyone who contributed to this endeavor. On behalf of the Econometric Society and Bocconi University, I thank them all for their superb efforts. 

I especially thank the 2022 ESEM Program Chairs, Ingvild Almås (Stockholm University) and Vasiliki Skreta (UT Austin, UCL and CERP) who have put together an exceptionally interesting program for us to enjoy in the coming days, and the Local Organizing Chair Massimiliano Marcellino who is doing this for the second time following his work on the World Congress.

I also thank the EEA’s Gemma Prunner-Thomas who continues to organize the EEA-ESEM meeting with energy and efficiency and the ES Executive Director Lyn Hogan for her help with this and all of the other Society meetings and schools throughout the year.    

This too is a good opportunity to thank my colleagues on the European Regional Standing Committee which I chair. I would like to thank Sven Rady who is Secretary to the Committee and Olivier Scaillet who manages the finances in his role as Treasurer, for their continued involvement with and commitment to the Society.