"Principles and Priorities" Federal Budget Exercise is an interactive exercise in which participants learn how interesting and challenging it can be to assemble a federal budget.

Please join us for a presentation by Justin Kirkland entitled "Focus on Sona Systems for Participant Recruitment and Study Management."

Join us to hear from Yu Awaya, University of Rochester, presenting, "Spreading Information via Social Networks: An Irrelevance Result." Abstract: An informed planner wishes to spread information among a group of agents in order to induce efficient coordination—say the adoption of a new technology with positive externalities. The agents are connected via a social network. The planner informs a seed and then the information spreads via the network. While the structure of the network affects the rate of diffusion, we show that the rate of adoption is the same for all acyclic networks.

Mehrdad Moharrami will present “A Policy Gradient Algorithm for the Risk-Sensitive Exponential Cost MDP."

Join us to hear from Josh Lerner, Harvard University. His presentation is titled, "What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?" Abstract: In recent years, impact investors—private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns—have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial characteristics of impact portfolios differ from their traditional counterparts.

Join us to hear from Colin Ward, University of Minnesota. His presentation is titled, "Appropriated Growth".  Abstract: We assess how labor mobility affects intangible investment through the lens of a structural model that features knowledge spillovers and an agency conflict between investors and key employees. Our calibration to US data targets responses of employee turnover and firms’ intangible investment to variation in workers’ outside option values that are identified by state-level changes in degrees of non-compete enforcement. Counterfactual analysis finds that the current degree of restrictions on labor mobility across states is close to being optimal for both investors and workers. The Clarence Tow Lectures in Finance Series brings high-profile researchers to Tippie College of Business to present to an audience of faculty, PhD students, and researchers from around the University of Iowa.