The Unassuming Economist

Call for Papers

The International Monetary Fund will hold the Thirteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference at its headquarters in Washington DC on November 8-9, 2012.

The conference is intended to provide a forum for discussing innovative research in economics, undertaken by both IMF staff and by outside economists, and to facilitate the exchange of views among researchers and policymakers. Peter Diamond (MIT) will deliver the Mundell-Fleming lecture.

The theme of the conference is “Labor Markets through the Lens of the Great Recession.” The Program Committee welcomes papers that investigate the lessons of the crisis for labor market dynamics, as well as short-run and long-run policy challenges concerning employment growth and structural changes in labor markets in industrial and developing economies. Possible topics include (without being exclusive):

Comparative performance of labor markets in the crisis: 

• Output, participation, employment, unemployment 
• Variations in Okun’s law across countries 
• The age and skill distribution of unemployment 
• The role of labor market institutions 
• Policy measures, employment, unemployment 
• Fiscal policies, output and employment 
• Hysteresis in unemployment 
• Informal employment and links to growth and financial frictions 

Unemployment and the Arab spring

• Wage distributions, inequality, and political economy implications 
• Globalization and wage distributions 
• Technological progress and wage distributions 
• Role and limits of redistribution 

Reforms, employment, and unemployment

• Short and long-term effects of labor market reforms 
• Short and long-term effects of product market reforms 

Please submit a proposal (in Word or PDF format), which should be no shorter than two pages and no longer than five pages by June 8, 2012 (e-mail to ARC@imf.org). Please use the contact author’s name as the name of the file. The Program Committee will evaluate all proposals in terms of originality, analytical rigor, and policy relevance and will contact the authors whose papers have been selected by June 30, 2012. A 15-page work-in-progress draft will be required by August 15, 2012. Further information on the conference program will be posted on the IMF website (www.imf.org).