Past Workshops and Conferences
Symposium on the Lessons of Classical Liberalism for the Modern World, 20-21 June 2024
On June 20-21, the LSE will host a workshop on the Lessons of Classical Liberalism for the Modern World. This event is sponsored by the LSE's Department of Social Policy, the LSE Hayek Programme, the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University Law School, the Hayek Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and the Institute for Humane Studies.
There are a small number of places available to attend this symposium. In order to request a place, please contact Professor Adam Oliver by email at a.j.oliver@lse.ac.uk
You can find out more here.
LSE Environment Week, 11-15 September 2023
The Economics of Environment and Energy Programme (EEE), International Growth Centre (IGC) and Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID) within the LSE Economics Department is convening the second Environment Week at the LSE on 11-15 September 2023. Working with partners at the School and across the world we want to use Environment Week to encourage economists from all fields of economics to work on environmental issues and to connect this work to policy change.
The urgency of addressing climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation continues to rise, highlighting the need for research in this area. Achieving a more sustainable balance between human activity and the natural environment, while maintaining economic growth, remains a significant challenge. Addressing it will require substantial innovation in multiple directions, including finding ways to make economic growth cleaner, control environmental externalities, and protect human populations from environmental change.
To identify and explore these innovations, we invite submissions from various fields of economics - including development, macroeconomics, industrial organisation, public, finance, labour, trade, urban, theory, behavioural, and political economy - as well as environmental, energy, and climate.
You can find out more here.
LSE Environment Week, 19-23 September 2022
The Economics of Environment and Energy Programme (EEE), International Growth Centre (IGC) and Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID) within the LSE Economics Department will convene an Environment Week at the LSE from 19-23 September 2022. Working with partners at the School and across the world we want to use Environment Week to encourage economists from all fields of economics to work on environmental issues and to connect this work to policy change.
This work is urgently needed given rising concerns over climate change, pollution and environmental degradation. Achieving a better balance between human activity and the natural environment, without sacrificing economic growth, represents a major challenge. Confronting it will require large-scale innovation on multiple dimensions: in how economic growth can be made cleaner, in how we control different environmental externalities, and in how we protect human populations from environmental change.
Working out what these innovations are will require inputs from many fields of economics - development, macroeconomics, industrial organization, public, finance, labor, trade, urban, theory, behavioral, political economy - as well as environmental, energy and climate.
Events sponsored by the Hayek Programme:
- 20th September, 16:00 - 17:30 MASTERCLASS: Innovation and the environment
Speakers: Philippe Aghion (LSE), Antoine Dechezleprêtre (LSE Grantham Institute), and David Hémous (University of Zurich) - 21st September, 16:00 - 17:00 MASTERCLASS: Political economy of climate action
Speakers: Timothy Besley (LSE) - 21st September, 18:30 - 20:00 PUBLIC EVENT: Ray of Hope? Innovation and the Climate Crisis
Chair: Lord Nicholas Stern (LSE)
Speakers: John van Reenen (LSE), Robin Burgess (LSE), Mar Reguant (Northwestern University), and Pol Simpson (LSE)
You can find out more here.
1st International Behavioural Public Policy Conference, 7-10 September 2022
The 1st International Behavioural Public Policy Conference was held at the LSE from 7-10 September 2022. The conference was organised in partnership with King's College London, Frontier Economics, the Behavioural Insights Team, the LSE Hayek Programme, STICERD, The University of Notre Dame's Research Program on Law and Market Behavior and Expilab Research.
This new annual conference, the first of its type, aims to fill a gap by providing a forum for those interested in the link between behavioural science and public policy to discuss their work. Future conferences are planned to take place at universities around the world. Theoretical, methodological, conceptual and applied work was presented at the conference. Presentations fall within the broad scope of the journal, Behavioural Public Policy - namely that they in some sense consider both behavioural theory and public policy issues from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives - and the authors of a selection of the best papers presented at the conference were invited to have their work considered for a special issue of the journal.
You can find out more information here.
History, Culture and Popular Belief Workshop, July 2022
The workshop brings together scholars studying cultural norms from diverse fields and disciplines, with a special focus on inquiries into popular beliefs using a folkloric approach. The first half of the workshop features cutting-edge work on cultural norms using the tools of behavioural economics, political economy, and economic history and the second half focuses on understanding popular beliefs using a folkloric approach.
Workshop programme
- 09.00am Breakfast
- 09:30am Opening Remarks by Tim Besley (LSE)
- 09.40am Flow of Ideas: Economic Societies and the Rise of Useful Knowledge by Erik Hornung (University of Cologne) | Discussant: TBA
- 10.30am High-Value Work and the Rise of Women: The Cotton Revolution and Gender Equality in China by Melanie Meng Xue (LSE) | Discussant: TBA
- 11.20am Coffee Break
- 11.40am Universalism: Global Evidence by Benjamin Enke (Harvard) | Disscusant: TBA
- 12.30pm Lunch
- 2.00pm The Origin and Cultural Evolution of Taboos in Human Societies by Kevin Hong (Harvard) | Discussant: Eleanor Power (LSE)
- 2.50pm Violence Against Suspected Witches in France, 1790-1940 by Will Pooley (Bristol)| Discussant: James Fenske (Warwick)
- 3.40pm Coffee Break
- 4.00pm What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books by Alex Eble (Columbia) | Discussant: TBA
- 4.50pm
Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives
Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich) | Discussant: Noam Yuchtman (LSE) - 5.40pm Semantic Decomposition on Fairy Tale Tradition Networks: Toward a Method for Understanding Tradition Groups at Scale by Timothy Tangherlini (Berkeley) | Discussant: TBA
- 7.00pm Dinner
Find out more on the History, Culture, and Popular Belief Workshop website
The report on the Workshop is available here.
Hayek Workshop, May 2022
The two-day workshop was the continuation of the Hayek seminar discussions about how to make policy decisions under radical uncertainty. The programme comprised of six panels along with a lunch discussion that included researchers from multiple fields, including Anthropology, Behavioural Science, Business, Economics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology. Below is the list of panelists with their respective disciplines.
Day 1, 19 May
Panel 1: Models
- Tim Besley (Chair) [Economics]
- Nancy Cartwright [Philosophy]
- Florian Artinger [Economics]
Panel 2: Narratives
- Paul Collier (Chair) [Economics]
- David Tuckett [Psychology]
- Mary Morgan [Economic History]
Lunch Discussion: The Limitations of Forecasting and Modelling in Climate, Epidemiology, Technology, and Economics.
- Matt Ridley in conversation with John Kay
Panel 3: Evolution and Culture
- Amar Bhide (Chair) [Business Administration]
- Andrea Migliano [Anthropology]
- Jean-Paul Carvalho [Economics]
Panel 4: Small versus large worlds
- Mervyn King (Chair) [Economics]
- Matt Ford [Economics]
- Nick Chater [Behavioural Science]
Day 2, 20 May
Panel 5: Rationality
- Richard Bronk (Chair) [Economics]
- Jens Beckert [Sociology]
- Gerd Gigerenzer [Psychology]
Panel 6: Policy implications
- Tim Besley (Chair) [Economics]
- Mervyn King [Economics]
- John Kay [Economics]