Economics Nobel Prize winner to address Melbourne conference

Nobel Prize winner for economics, Professor Dale Mortensen will be a keynote speaker at the 2012 Econometric Society Australasian Meeting in Melbourne (3 to 6 July) which is being hosted by Deakin University.

Deakin University, Associate Professor Mehmet Ulubasoglu, said the conference, to be held at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne, has been hosted by distinguished economics groups across Australasia every year.

"We are particularly pleased to have Professor Mortensen as a keynote speaker," he said.

"Professor Mortensen with Peter Diamond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christopher Pissarides, London School of Economics and Political Science won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his ground breaking work explaining why the labour market is 'sticky'.

"Professor Mortensen contributed to a framework that seeks to explain why there are so many people unemployed at the same time as there are a large number of job openings.

"Their model helps explain the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy.

"Significantly it can also be applied to other areas, including the housing market."

Associate Professor Ulubasoglu said other keynote and invited speakers would also be coming from, among others, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, UCLA, and World Bank for the conference.

"Professor Alvin Roth from Harvard University is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, for incompatible patient-donor pairs," Associate Professor Ulubasoglu said.

"Kidney exchange now takes place in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. Mathematical tools of economic theory such as matching help with a deeper analysis of this exchange.

"He will be talking about the accomplishments and the new challenges to growth facing kidney exchange."

Professor Dani Rodrik, who is the Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University will talk about his research into developing countries, including countries in Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

"I will show the results of new research that suggests manufacturing is like an automatic escalator to economic riches: the more a country is able to expand its manufacturing industries, the faster it will grow," he said.

"The difficulty is that countries differ in their ability to industrialize, and international competition these days make it harder for certain countries to move away from natural resource based economies to industry."

Associate Professor Ulubasoglu said the conference will host about 250 papers across more than 80 sessions over three days.

Deakin's Chair in Financial Econometrics Professor Joakim Westerlund, Dr Ruipeng Liu, Dr Emin Gahramanov and PhD candidates Pablo Jimenez and Muhammad Habibur Rahman would also be presenting at the conference.

Further information:

About the conference

Professor Mortensen will speak on Equilibrium Labor: Turnover, Firm Growth, and Unemployment on Wednesday July 4 at 9:15am in the Ballroom.

Professor Mortensen talks about his Nobel Prize research with reporters

Professor Roth will speak on Kidney Exchange: Accomplishments and New Challenges on Thursday, July 5, at 11am in the Ballroom.

Professor Rodrik will speak on Structural Change, Industrialisation, and Economic Convergence on Thursday, July 5 at 16:40 in the Ballroom.

Go to Professor Rodrik's blog or listen to his talk on the future of economic convergence at the London School of Economics.