With an old and distinguished history, the program of faculty directed workshops for students at the dissertation writing stage is a hallmark of the University of Minnesota program.

Initially this program was informal in nature but even those who took part in the early versions (see the students of Ed Prescott and Tim Kehoe for example) look back on those days with both fear and affection.

In recent years, the program has expanded considerably with workshops offered for students writing dissertations in Growth and Development, International Trade, Industrial Organization, International Finance, Macroeconomics, Applied Microeconomics, Economic Theory, Public Economics and Policy, and Financial Economics.

The workshops meet once a week with students doing presentations on the current state of their own dissertation research. The feedback is immediate and quite often devastating! But it is all in the spirit of cooperative learning.

Students routinely say that it is one of the best, if toughest, experiences that they have while at Minnesota.

"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

"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 Allen Workshop

Participants in the Allen workshop investigate topics in microeconomic theory and game theory, broadly defined. The participants range from students in their second year of the Ph.D. program who are simultaneously completing the game theory field sequence to those in their final year of their program preparing for their final dissertation oral defense.

The workshop meets over lunch on Fridays to encourage an informal atmosphere. Each student presents for a full session at least once during each semester.

Information and advice is given to participants about research conferences. Students are encouraged to submit research papers to appropriate meetings. Workshop participants have presented at a recent Midwest Economic Theory conference and several students presented papers at recent Econometric Society North American Summer Meeting.

The workshop emphasizes active participation by the audience with constructive criticism and comments.

Another strength of the Chari, Jones, Boldrin workshop was the wide variety of topics from mechanism design and contracts to applied micro and labor. The comments you receive on your work were amazing. I know people who wrote good papers based on comments at the workshop. The workshop also allowed to communicate in more detail with your advisor. Chari and Kocherlakota spent a lot of time with me outside the workshop but it was still useful to present formally your work in all detail.

Finally, workshops show younger students what it takes to write a paper. I think they are an integral part of keeping Minnesota tradition of graduate excellence where more second and third year graduate students look at successful job market students and get ideas what it takes to do good economics."

Aleh Tsyvinski
UCLA

The Boldrin, Chari, Jones Workshop

The Boldrin-Chari-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.

"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.

The Eckstein, Holmes and Kortum 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.

Members of the 2004-2005
Eckstein, Holmes, and Kortum Workshop