Applied Microeconomics
Applied Microeconomics
The Applied Microeconomics research group unites researchers working on a broad array of topics within such areas as labour economics, economics of education, health economics, family economics, urban economics, environmental economics, and the economics of science and innovation. The group operates in close collaboration with the CAGE Research Centre.
The group participates in the CAGE seminar on Applied Economics, which runs weekly on Tuesdays at 2:15pm. Students and faculty members of the group present their ongoing work in two brown bag seminars, held weekly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 1pm. Students, in collaboration with faculty members, also organise a bi-weekly reading group in applied econometrics on Thursdays at 1pm. The group organises numerous events throughout the year, including the Research Away Day and several thematic workshops.
Our activities
Work in Progress seminars
Tuesdays and Wednesdays 1-2pm
Students and faculty members of the group present their work in progress in two brown bag seminars. See below for a detailed scheduled of speakers.
Applied Econometrics reading group
Thursdays (bi-weekly) 1-2pm
Organised by students in collaboration with faculty members. See the Events calendar below for further details
People
Academics
Academics associated with the Applied Microeconomics Group are:
Natalia Zinovyeva
Co-ordinator
Jennifer Smith
Deputy Co-ordinator
Research Students
Events
CRETA Seminar - Gabriel Carroll (Toronto)
Title: Is Equal Opportunity Different from Welfarism?
Abstract: Equal opportunity, widely invoked in popular discourse as a goal for policy, seems at odds with the welfarist approach that is standard in economics. But are they really different? We consider a canonical class of resource allocation problems and ask whether the allocations chosen by an equal-opportunity criterion could also have been chosen under some welfarist criterion. Typically, no such welfarist criterion exists. However, for a rich class of problem specifications, it does exist, and we characterize this class. In the cases where the sought-after welfarist criterion does not exist, the basic reason is that it is overconstrained: it would have to equalize a measure of marginal welfare across too many points in allocation space. On the other hand, when the welfarist criterion does exist, it can use either the sum or the min to aggregate individual welfares; the freedom to use more exotic aggregators is not needed.