iCare6 Helps Mark 20th Anniversary of HSE Perm
On September 20-21, the Perm campus of the Higher School of Economics hosted the sixth International Conference on Applied Research in Economics (iCare6), an event that focuses on research with applications to and implications for real-life problems. The conference acronym reflects its motto: iCare = I care.
Held as part of the events celebrating the 20th anniversary of HSE Perm, this year’s conference brought together faculty, independent scholars, practitioners, and PhD students to discuss a wide range of subjects, including empirical corporate finance, experimental economics and finance, labour economics, and international economics.
‘The agenda and keynote speakers in 2018 really reflect the aim of the conference to focus on research that has applications to and implications for real-life problems’, said Neil Kellard, Professor of Finance at the Essex Business School (University of Essex) and a member of the Conference Programme Committee. ‘As always with the conference, I was looking for excellent research papers that cover a wide variety of important topics for the contemporary world. Again, that was seen this year, with special sessions on sustainable development, behavioural economics, public economics and cryptocurrencies to name just a few’.
John Rust, Professor in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University, gave a keynote address entitled ‘Has dynamic programming improved decision making?’, which discussed a powerful tool for solving a wide class of sequential decision making problems under uncertainty.
Apart from the paper topic of his keynote address, Professor Rust is currently involved in projects studying the dynamics of hotel and steel pricing. ‘Just last Friday I visited the headquarters of a major international steel company, which is providing us data to study and model their operations’, he said, noting that he was looking forward not only to sharing his own research but also to absorbing the other papers presented.
Professor Kellard, who greatly enjoys being part of the Conference Programme Committee, is currently collaborating with Professor Dmitri Vinogradov in the Faculty of Economics, Management, and Business Informatics at the HSE Campus in Perm and Professor Yousef Makhlouf of Nottingham Trent University on a study of inequality and financial development. Their research shows that although an increase in financial development can reduce inequality over a few years, in the long term, it increases inequality. In addition, he is currently working on three other lines of research: bubbles and crashes in commodity markets; firm behaviour in the European market for carbon, and inequality and financial development.
Professor Kellard had previously visited both Perm and Moscow. ‘I enjoyed visiting them both. In Perm I thought the opera was fantastic, whilst in Moscow, St Basil’s Cathedral and Moscow State University were very impressive!’, he said. The conference provided Professor Rust his first opportunity to visit Russia. ‘I am looking forward to eating some really good Russian food at the conference and maybe having a drink of fine Russian vodka too!’, he exclaimed.
Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for HSE News service