The seventh annual Warwick Economics PhD Conference

The seventh edition of Warwick Economics PhD Conference was held during 3-4 June 2019. The event was organised by PhD students with the help of the Marketing team and with financial support from the department.

In addition to the generous financial support from the department, CAGE provided funding for a newly-launched research grant for perspective applied projects by PhD Students.

The conference is organised by PhD students of the Economics department at Warwick annually and this year, received about 200 applications from graduate students of leading research institutions across the world. A multi-stage selection process, involving a scientific committee consisting of Warwick faculty members and PhD students, helped in process of whittling down these high-quality applications to just twenty – 12 seminar presentations and 8 poster presentations.

Prof. Debraj Ray set the ball rolling with his engaging keynote address. The talk focused on the logical next step of research for the PhD students in the audience: how to publish, and publish well. This was followed by top-notch presentations by students from UCLA, MIT, KU Leuven, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Toulouse School of Economics, Queen Mary University, LSE, UPF, Paris School of Economics, and University of Toronto.

The papers presented covered a broad range of topics and fields in the subject – Political and Public Economics, Industrial Organization, Development, Economics Theory, Econometrics, Behavioural, and Applied Economics. Each 20-minutes presentation was followed by a discussion and comments from students and faculty members in the audience, providing the authors constructive feedback on their work. Interesting poster presentations contributed another aspect to the event and were also well received.

This year, the Conference – thanks to generous CAGE funding – was able to provide, for the first time in its history, financial support to applied research projects deemed promising by an evaluation committee of faculty members. The three winners of the grant presented their projects on the second day of the Conference.

Alongside the academic discussions, the conference also catered towards opportunities for informal discussions and networking during the lunch events and the Conference Dinner.

Overall, the event was a success and achieved its target of providing a platform to graduate students from different institutions to showcase their work, as well as giving an opportunity to Warwick students to discuss their research and promote the department’s program to their peers across the globe.

Learn more about who the participants were and their projects.