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 technological diffusion of revolutionary technologies and general purpose technologies (GPTs) across major economies, highlight inter-dependencies between these different innovations, and estimate impacts of technical 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.
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).
B & E Student Paper Award Winners for 2023
The Business and Economic Statistics Section announced the winners of the 2023 American Statistical Association Student Paper Awards, given by the section.
- Hyeong Jin Hyun, Purdue University, "Neural Inference for Diffusion Processes"
- Mengxin Yu, Princeton University, "Strategic Decision-Making in the Presence of Information Asymmetry: Provably Efficient RL with Algorithmic Instruments"
- Xiaotian Zheng, University of California, Santa Cruz, "A Mixture Modeling Framework for Temporal Point Processes with Memory"
- Yi Han, Universitiy of California, Davis, "Structural Break Detection in Non-stationary Network Vector Autoregression Models."
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 membes of the 2023 B&E Student Paper Awards Committee, access the student awards annoucment (PDF file).
Congratulations to the award winners for their submissions.
Links to Slides, Video from SAPW 2022 Now Available
The 4th Seasonal Adjustment Practitioners Workshop was held on June 8 and 9, with speakers from 10 international statistical agencies and central banks, four U.S. statistical agencies, four universities, and three private companies/consulting firms. Topics were diverse, with many focusing on the response to pandemic effects in time series estimates. The workshop included shorter lightning presentations for the first time this year.
The workshop page has been updated with slides and videos of available presentations. Access the available presentations on the Government Statistical Society website.
There is now a YouTube channel for the SAPW. Become a subscriber today!
2022 Zellner Award Winner Announced
The Business and Economic Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association and sponsor SAS are proud to announce the recipients of the 2021 Arnold Zellner Thesis Award:
The award includes a $1500 prize, generously provided by SAS Institute.
For more information on the Zellner Thesis Award, including submission information for the 2022 Zellner Thesis Award, access the Zellner Thesis Award Page.
B&E Section Election Results Announced
The B&E Section announces the results for the 2022 ASA Election for section officers:
Chair-Elect 2023: David Matteson (Cornel University)
Program Chair-Elect 2023: Daniel Kowal (Rice University)
Secretary/Treasurer 2023-2024: Yao Zheng (University of Connecticut)
Council of Sections Representative 2023-2025: Tucker McElroy (US Census Bureau)
Many thanks to all the candidates and congratulations to the winners!.