"The workshop with Tim and Ed was a great experience. a presentation is the primary method of communicating your work these days and the workshop was a great opportunity to get practice and advice early on. it was also a good opportunity to learn how to be critical (in the positive sense of the word) of other people's work."

Betsy Caucutt
University of Western Ontario

The Applied Micro Workshop

Graduate students writing a substantive empirical application are invited to participate in the applied microeconomics workshop. The economics faculty participants include Patrick Bajari, Kyoo-il Kim, Minjung Park and Amil Petrin. Other economics faculty and other applied microeconomists from throughout the university, including health policy and the Carlson school, also regularly participate. Each term, the organizers choose a set of papers organized around an active area of recent research. These papers include topics in econometric theory and their recent applications. For example, in the fall of 2007, the participants read papers concerning the econometrics of bounds estimation and their application to studying strategic interaction in industrial organization. The papers are presented by a graduate student, but all participants actively discuss the research. Also, during the last part of the workshop, students present their recent workshop. This is an opportunity for the graduate students to receive critical feedback on their research from faculty members and their peer graduate students.

"People say sometimes that imitation is the purest form of admiration. When Dirk arrived at Penn, one of the very first things we did was to organize a macro workshop for students in the tradition of Minnesota. Clearly we are not as wise giving feedback as our elders (hope Ed or Chari do not mind too much me calling them elders) in Minnesota, but we were so deeply conviced that the Macro workshop was Minnesota as its best that we have recreated it here at Penn. Until you have actually participated in the Minnesota workshop, it is difficult to grasp how much you will get out of it and how much will it help you to become a serious economist."

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde
University of Pennsylvania

The Arellano Kehoe Perri Workshop

Cristina Arellano, Tim Kehoe, and Fabrizio Perri work with students interested in trade and in international macro. Comments from former participants give a real flavor for what the workshop is like. This is a continuation of the original Kehoe Prescott workshop that began in 1990. Interestingly enough, Fabrizio Perri participated in the workshop as a visiting graduate student during the Kehoe Prescott years.

The Chari Jones Workshop

TheChari-Jones workshop is about as eclectic as it gets. Students present ongoing work in a multitude of different areas ranging from macro to labor to development to growth to the industrial revolution. The workshop is designed to be a free-for-all. The aim is to push forward the frontier of substantive economic theory. The idea is to promote the Minnesota tradition: rigorous economic theorizing applied to significant applied problems together with care and attention paid to quantitatively important questions. One comment typically shows up in every presentation: What question are you attempting to ask in this paper? The most important feature of the workshop is that it is a work in progress and so subject to regular changes in how to structure the learning process.

The Holmes Workshop

Students working in applied microeconomics present their research at least once a semester. The work that is presented varies in the stage of completeness, ranging from the early stages of a research idea to a completed research paper. Regardless of the stage of completeness, the student is expected to clearly motivate the importance of the economic question that is being addressed. Students are expected to contribute the discussion of their fellow students' work.

"I participated in several workshops while in Minnesota. One of them was organized by Jan Werner. Jan's workshop combined the advantages of a reading group with the help one can get in a student's workshop. Part of the workshop consisted of presenting and discussing papers related to a specific research topic. This helped me a lot in developing a good judgement of quality in research and gave me some own research ideas. Then students had to present their own work. It was a casual, hence comforting atmosphere with Jan and the students constantly interacting with the presenter. I learned a lot from these discussions and always got a tremendous amount of feedback about my own research when I presented myself. The workshop definitely made me a better researcher and I can imagine recreating a similar design and atmosphere when organizing my own workshop."

Thor Koeppl
Queen's University

The Werner Workshop

The workshop is open to all students with interest in microeconomic theory, finance, game theory, or mathematical economics. Participants are expected to present their work in progress and be active in discussion of the work of others. The atmosphere is informal fostering constructive criticism and open discussion. The aim is to provide as much help as possible in developing substantive research projects, and give an opportunity to learn how to present own work in a seminar setting. Typical workshop presentations are presentations of students' papers or their work in progress. Presentations of recent papers of others that merely indicate the presenter's research plans are encouraged, too. The workshop meets every Friday afternoon during the semesters and occasionally off-season.