Top econometricians from Canada and abroad gathered recently at the University of Guelph for the 32nd Meeting of the Canadian Econometric Study Group (CESG). Held annually at a Canadian university, the conference was organized by Department of Economics and Finance professors Alex Maynard, Thanasis Stengos and Yiguo Sun, and marked the third time the CESG has met at Guelph. It welcomed two of the world’s top econometricians as its keynote speakers, Donald Andrews from Yale University and Qi Li from Texas A&M.

The plenaries at the CESG conference shared new methods for analyzing economic data using non-linear econometric models, which are more complex, yet more flexible than their linear counterparts. Econometrics, in short, is the development and application of statistical methods tailored to economic data, which allows economists to identify relationships that exist within large data sets. Since economic data are often observational data collected by government agencies, rather than data from carefully controlled experiments, drawing reliable conclusions can be more challenging than in the sciences. This is the challenge taken up by the field of econometrics.

“This conference investigated a very diverse range of both methodological development and practical applications,” said Maynard, whose research focuses on time series and financial econometrics. “We brought these leading econometricians together to help improve methodology and address issues that arise out of economic data and economic problems.”

Andrews, a preeminent econometrician and Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, presented his paper, “Identification- and Singularity-Robust Inference for Moment Condition Models”. Li, a world renowned expert in nonparametric methods, who is a former University of Guelph faculty member, spoke on “Detecting Financial Data Dependence Structure by Averaging Mixture Copulas.”

In addition to two keynote addresses and twelve plenary sessions, which were accompanied by insightful discussions, attendees also engaged in more informal knowledge sharing through two poster sessions. All events were structured consecutively, so attendees had the opportunity to attend each session and all presenters benefitted from the attention and expertise of the economists in attendance. 

A larger number of young researchers and graduates also participated in the conference.

“It’s incredibly important for us to be supportive of future researchers,” Maynard added.

The conference was supported by the following generous sponsors:

• Canadian Economic Association [1]
• College of Business and Economics, University of Guelph [2]
• Department of Economics and Finance, University of Guelph [3]
• International Association for Applied Econometrics (IAAE) [4]
• Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) [5]

Photo note: All three of the photos in this story were taken at the first poster session at the CESG conference of PhD Candidates speaking about their research with fellow attendees.