Economics-Law conference April 17-18 highlights cross-disciplinary initiative
The Economic Research Initiatives at Duke is part of a strategy to link economics and other disciplines
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A conference this week on economics and law highlights a new initiative by the Department of Economics to strengthen research across traditional disciplines.
The conference, “The Applications of Economic Analysis in Law,” runs all day Friday and Saturday, April 17-18 at the R.J. Reynolds Auditorium at the Fuqua School of Business. The event is free and open to the public.
“We economists do research that has implications for both legal scholarship and legal practice,” said Hanming Fang, a conference organizer and associate professor of economics. However, “the way economists do research may not be as visible to lawyers and judges as we would like.”
“The idea of this conference was to break this barrier,” he said.
Presentations will cover research on racial profiling, affirmative action, mental health care, wiretapping and other topics.
The event is sponsored by the economics department’s Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) in conjunction with the Law School. The Provost's Common Fund for Interdisciplinary Studies and the Arts & Sciences Conference Grant also provided funding.
ERID is an effort implemented this year to further a culture of collaboration among economics faculty in various subfields and researchers in other disciplines. It builds a “cluster hiring” strategy by the economics department to recruit faculty members who would be likely to work on research projects with one another and/or with other Duke faculty.
“The economics profession has taken notice of Duke’s gains,” said Fang, the director of ERID. Now the ERID program aims “to make it clear to the profession that Duke economics has a unique vision for building the department.”
ERID hosted three conferences last semester. One was on a method for analyzing data and two were aimed at promising young economists, with one focusing on macroeconomics and the other on statistical methods.