May Postgraduate and Early Career Economics Workshop at NUI Galway

NUI Galway’s Discipline of Economics will host this year’s Irish Postgraduate and Early Career Economics Workshop from 6-7 June. The event is aimed at PhD students, PostDocs, early career researchers and advanced Masters students based in higher education and research institutions.

The meeting will feature the work and findings of scholars in economics and related fields, and will provide an opportunity to engage with research results and work-in-progress in a constructive environment.

The workshop will also host a training event, entitled ‘An Introduction to Machine Learning for Economics’ on Thursday, 6 June, from 1-5pm. The training will be delivered by Dr Achim Ahrens, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ERSI). It will provide an overview of popular Machine Learning techniques and the focus will be on Lasso regression, a regularisation and model selection method that can deal with high-dimensional data. It will also discuss how the Lasso and other Machine Learning tools can be useful for economists; in particular, how Machine Learning can improve predictions and facilitate causal inference.

This year a range of thematic sessions and training events will feature, including full paper thematic sessions with discussants and early-stage/emerging research findings thematic sessions with general open discussion. On Thursday, 6 June, from 1-5pm, a workshop on ‘An Introduction to Machine Learning for Economists’, will be delivered by Dr Achim Ahrens, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ERSI). On Friday, 7 June, a short training session on ‘Publishing your Research in Peer-Reviewed Journals – Tips from Journal Editors’ will take place.

Dr John Cullinan, Senior Lecturer in Economics at NUI Galway, said: “The event is an ideal opportunity for early career researchers in economics to showcase their work, receive constructive feedback, and build collaborations and networks for the future. There is also an important training element to the workshop, where participants can learn about the latest methodological developments in the field and engage with journal editors on how to publish their research.”

The event is free but is ticketed via Eventbrite. To register visit https://bit.ly/2LYIQ73   

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