Call for Participation: SAPW 2024
Since 2016, four Seasonal Adjustment Practitioners Workshops (SAPW) have taken place: three at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC, and one held virtually. These workshops provided valuable experiences for both attendees and presenters, and plans are underway to organize another workshop.
The next virtual workshop will be held on September 11th (1 to 4:30 PM EDT) and September 12th (9 AM to noon EDT). The American Statistical Association's Government Statistics Section, Business and Economics Statistics Section, and the Washington Statistical Society have provided support for past workshops. The National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) is a new sponsor of SAPW 2024.
For more information, access the Call for Participation on this website.
B & E Student Paper Award Winners for 2024
The Business and Economic Statistics Section announced the winners of the 2024 American Statistical Association Student Paper Awards, given by the section.
- Yihong Gu, Princeton University (Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering), “Environment Invariant Linear Least Squares”
- Yi Zhang, Harvard University (Department of Statistics), “Individualized Policy Evaluation and Learning under Clustered Network Interference”
- John Zito, Rice University (Department of Statistics), “The Projected Dynamic Linear Model for Time Series on the Sphere”
- Angela Wyse, University of Chicago (Harris School of Public Policy), “Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults”
The award-winning students will present their papers at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in a Topic-Contributed session. The students will also receive a cash award.
For more details, including a complete list of the members of the 2024 B&E Student Paper Awards Committee, access the student awards announcement (PDF file).
Congratulations to the award winners for their submissions.
Professor Michelle Alexopoulos is the 2023 Economic Outlook Lunchtime Speaker
Professor Michelle Alexopoulos of the University of Toronto is the speaker at this year’s Economic Outlook Luncheon, which will be held on Tuesday, August 8th starting at 12:30 PM.
Dr. Alexopoulos' talk is titled "Off The Books: Exploring Alternate Measures Of Technical Change and Knowledge Diffusion". The abstract for this talk appears below:
The application of text mining to digitized library collections, along with meta-data from OCLC's WorldCat Database can be used to create alternative measures of technological innovation and diffusion. After these techniques are reviewed, we will explore how the resulting metrics can be used to map the waves of innovation over time and space, examine the technological diffusion of revolutionary technologies and general purpose technologies (GPTs) across major economies, highlight inter-dependencies between these different innovations, and estimate impacts of technological change on the economy. These methods can help further our understanding of technical change, and its contribution to economic growth, business cycles, and productivity within and across countries over time. They are also likely to provide important information on the development and diffusion of new GPTs such as AI and robotics that can help complement measures collected by our national statistical agencies.
Keywords: Business and Economic Statistics Section, Technical Change & Diffusion, General Purpose Technologies, Text & Data Mining, Productivity, Economic Growth
You will need to sign up for this luncheon in advance.
More information on this talk is available in the JSM 2023 Online Program.
Biographical information for Dr. Alexopoulos is available on the University of Toronto website.
2023 Zellner Award Winner Announced
The Business and Economic Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association and sponsor SAS are proud to announce the recipient of the 2023 Arnold Zellner Thesis Award: Davide Viviano for the University of California San Diego thesis "Essays in Policy Design and Statistical Inference." An honorable mention was awarded to Kohei Yata for the Yale University thesis "Econometric Methods for Program Evaluation and Policy Choice."
The award includes a $1500 prize, generously provided by SAS Institute.
For more information on the Zellner Thesis Award, including submission information for the Zellner Thesis Award, access the Zellner Thesis Award Page.
B&E Section Election Results Announced
The B&E Section announces the results for the 2023 ASA Election for section officers:
- Chair-Elect 2024: Rebecca Sela (JPMorgan Chase & Co)
- Program Chair-Elect 2024: Mariana Saenz-Ayala (Georgia Southern University)
Many thanks to all the candidates and congratulations to the winners!.
Dennis Fixler Receives 2023 Shiskin Award
Dennis Fixler, Chief Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is recognized for his innovative contributions to the conceptual framework and practical methodology for the measurement of financial intermediation services in the national accounts and the producer price index and of insurance services in the national accounts.
Dr. Fixler has occupied the positions of Chief Statistician or Chief Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis since 2001. After arriving at BEA, he led the implementation of new measures of financial intermediation services that incorporated insights from his research in the national accounts and developed and led the implementation of an improved approach to measuring the output of property-casualty insurers that can be relied on to produce accurate estimates even at times of major disasters. The methods for estimating the output of property-casualty developed as part of implementing this approach have been adopted internationally. Dr. Fixler also led the development of inequality indicators that show how personal income from the national accounts is distributed across households, and help to reveal whether the benefits of economic growth are widely shared
For more information, access the Shiskin Award Page or the final press release (PDF).