News, Sentiment, and Confidence in Fluctuations

On March 5-6, I am organizing in Mannheim with Paul Beaudry (University of British Columbia) and Atilim Seymen (Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung) a ZEW/CEPR conference on News, Sentiment and Confidence in Fluctuations. This goal is to present and discuss recent works on the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations which are related to information/expectations/believes, etc… The final program is not yet available, but accordoing to the amazing list of confirmed speaker, this is likely to be a great conference.

Confirmed speakers (updated list soon)

Alok Johri (McMaster University, Canada) • Bruce Preston (Columbia University, United States) • Christian Hellwig (Toulouse School of Economics, France, Centre for Economic Policy Research, United Kingdom) • Eric Sims (University of Notre Dame, United States) • Jean-Paul L’Huillier (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, Italy) • Luca Sala (IGIER, Università Bocconi, Italy) • Martin Uribe (Columbia University, United States) • Michael U. Krause (Deutsche Bundesbank, Germany) • Sylvain Leduc (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, United States) • Wouter Den Haan (London School of Economics and Political Science, Centre for Economic Policy Research, United Kingdom)

LABEX IAM-TSE

 Bonne nouvelle. Le projet de LABEX que nous avions déposé (IAM-TSE) a été retenu et sera financé à hauteur de 15 millions d’euros sur 8 années.

The RunMyCode project

 I have talked last thursday with Christophe Hurlin, a former co-author and colleague from the Université d’Orléans. He is involved in a fantastic project, RunMyCode, aiming at producing companion sites for research papers. The companion site will propose code, data and cloud computing resources, in order to promote reproducibility of research.

Soon, all serious journals will add a reproducibility requirement before publication. Such an initiative is dramatically reducing the cost of such a requirement. This is admirable provision of public good by scholars.

To quote the RunMyCode site:

“RunMyCode is a web service allowing people to run computer codes associated with a scientific publication (articles and working papers) using their own data and parameter values.
The service only requires a web browser as all calculations are done on a dedicated cloud computer. Once they are ready, results are automatically displayed to the user”

“RunMyCode follows three main objectives:
The first objective is to allow researchers to quickly disseminate internationally the results of their research, which will considerably increase the potential of citations of scientific papers.
The second objective is to provide a very large community of users with the ability to use the latest scientific methods in a user-friendly environment. This will speed up the process of converting scientific results into productive forces.
The third objective is to allow members of the academic community (researchers, editors, referees, etc) to replicate scientific results and to demonstrate their robustness. Thus, RunMyCode constitutes a revolutionary scientific validation tool. ”