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The inaugural Workshop on Empirical Methods in Macroeconomic Policy Analysis – jointly hosted by the Faculty of Business Administration, University of Bucharest and the Romanian Institute for Market Intelligence Research (RIMIR) – will be held in Bucharest, Romania on 16-17 May 2013.  It will be headlined by keynote speeches from:

Gianni Amisano Fabio Canova Rodney Strachan
European Central Bank European University Institute Australian National University


The workshop is thematically oriented towards empirical methods in macroeconomic policy analysis.  Understanding macroeconomic phenomena and designing macroeconomic policies requires adequate tools for extracting useful information from existing data.  Motivated by this observation and fueled by the recent economic downturns worldwide, significant research efforts are currently focused on developing methodologies that achieve an optimal balance between robustness and parsimony in conducting inference from macroeconomic data.

Indeed, the importance of finding such a balance is particularly underscored with respect to Balkan economies, where data is plagued with limited series lengths, frequent structural changes, as well as various errors and omissions.  Yet, the ongoing methodological research in this area is rarely applied to Balkan countries, and thus, tends to overlook the particularities related to this emerging region.

A central goal of this workshop is to bridge the latter gap by bringing together the expertise in empirical methodology with the expertise in Balkan economies and related policy issues. Specifically, it is intended to bring forth the most recent research methods capable of answering the many challenges of analyzing and designing macroeconomic  policy in the Balkan region, and at the same time, to motivate methodological research to consider these particular challenges in advancing empirical instruments.

The workshop is open for participation to academic researchers, policy makers and industry professionals alike.  In addition to the keynote speeches, the scientific program includes

  • Contributed talks
  • Poster session
  • Special poster session for Ph.D. students (with award for best poster)

Aside from the scientific activities scheduled for the two workshop days, a complementary guided tour of Bucharest landmarks is also planned (for those interested) for Saturday, 18 May.

To be included in the scientific program, scholarly papers should be submitted as indicated in the Call for Papers.  The workshop is intended to cover a wide range of interests in econometric methodology and its application to analyzing macroeconomic policy.  A short list of topics for submitted papers includes, but is not limited to

  • Bayesian and frequentist times series methods
  • Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium modeling
  • Model selection and shrinkage estimation
  • Forecasting and macroeconomic policy effects
  • Regime switching and change-point modeling
  • Simulation and computational efficiency issues

However, scholarly submission is not a requisite for attendance: non-contributing participants are likewise invited to register and attend.