Leading Economics Scholars Visit Yale SOM for Cowles Summer Conferences

Over 350 economists and scholars from across the globe flocked to Yale SOM’s Evans Hall in June for the 2025 Cowles Foundation Summer Conferences.

Housed within the Yale University economics department, the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics supports rigorous mathematical and statistical methods of economic analysis through grants, conferences, and a working paper series. Each year, the foundation hosts a series of two-day summer conferences featuring dozens of leading practitioners.

“The papers presented were very new, and many dealt with questions of immediate policy relevance,” said Diana Van Patten, assistant professor of economics, who spoke at the Conference on Macroeconomics. “As a junior professor, it’s a great opportunity to learn from and share ideas with very talented researchers.”

From June 2 to 6, SOM co-hosted five conferences in economic theory, labor and public economies, macroeconomics, models and measurement, and international trade. Faculty members from SOM spoke alongside colleagues affiliated with Yale’s economics department, other peer universities, and central banks.

SOM economics professor Jason Abaluck was one of two co-organizers for the Conference on Labor & Public Economics, during which invited speakers discussed topics including early childhood learning, collective bargaining, and student debt.

“The biggest way that the field is progressing is in the quality of the underlying data,” he said. “Some of the most important papers presented at the conference were notable not principally for innovating methodologically, but for doing a tremendous amount of hard work to construct a dataset that didn’t previously exist.”

Soheil Ghili, associate professor of marketing, presented his work on health insurance take-up during the Conference on Models & Measurement and appreciated the chance to receive “valuable feedback from the audience.”

Yale SOM Dean Kerwin K. Charles said that the school’s role as conference co-host attests to its strong relationships across the university.

“Supporting rigorous research is a core part of our mission,” Charles said. “When SOM helps put scholars in dialogue, the SOM community and broader society stand to benefit.”

Faculty organizers and speakers say they hope the conference will continue to push the frontiers of economic research.

“A standard complaint about modern economics is that we've sacrificed ‘big questions’ in pursuit of answerable questions,” Abaluck said. “Many of the papers presented this year deal with questions that are both big and answerable—the sweet spot!”