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Sound economic research is the bedrock of solid economic policy. That research is often inspired by confronting key policy issues in an independent environment.
The proof will be on display August 21-23 when some of the world’s leading economic thinkers gather for an academic conference—“Research and Policy: A Golden Minnesota Partnership”—and for a historic public event, a conversation with “The Four Horsemen of the Economic Revolution.”
It’s all to celebrate a half-century of a unique partnership between the Minneapolis Fed and the University of Minnesota, a collaboration that has fueled pioneering research and driven significant impact on monetary and public policy.
That impact was detailed in a recent Star Tribune commentary by Senior Vice President and Research Director Mark Wright and former Research Director Art Rolnick.
The three-day academic conference will be livestreamed on the Minneapolis Fed’s website. Registration for these sessions is closed.
The “Four Horsemen” conversation features Nobel laureates Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, and Christopher Sims, along with Neil Wallace. All were (and Prescott remains) Minneapolis Fed researchers. They received the collective moniker of “Four Horsemen” when all were on the faculty of the University’s economics department in the 1980s.
Their discussion, moderated by Rolnick, will be held at the University’s Ted Mann Concert Hall on Thursday, August 22, at 5 p.m., and is free and open to the public.
As Rolnick and Wright wrote in their Star Tribune commentary, the “Research and Policy” conference “is not a mere celebration of bygone research. Our glory days have not passed. Energetic, smart graduate students continue to shuttle between the university and the Fed, and they are proof that the future of the partnership is brilliant. In ways we cannot begin to imagine, when it comes to economic theory and policy, they will launch the next revolutions.”
