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:
Research Students
Events
PEPE Seminar - Lena Song (UIUC)
Title: Making Public Law: Artificial Intelligence for Legal Accessibility and Judicial Legitimacy (joint with Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, and Dominik Stammbach)
Abstract: Laws have increasingly become difficult for the public to understand due to their complexity and the decline in trusted legal journalism. We build a novel AI-powered legal summarizer to produce easy-to-read summaries of the reasoning in judicial opinions. We study the effects of these summaries in three related experiments. First, we show in a survey experiment that, compared to existing expert-written summaries, AI-generated simple summaries of U.S. Supreme Court judicial opinions are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. They help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education. Second, we study how these summaries affect policy attitudes and institutional legitimacy in a large-scale survey experiment around the release of the affirmative action decision in June 2023. While the summaries enhance understanding of judicial opinions across issues, they have mixed effects on the acceptance of court decisions. Finally, we explore the effect of these summaries on public discourse in a social media experiment.